ASSATEAGUE ISLAND, VA - It’s not just people traveling to Delmarva for the holidays - a great white shark named Anne Bonny is paying the Peninsula a visit just in time for Thanksgiving.
According to shark tracker Ocearch, the over 9-foot, 425 lb. juvenile white shark was pinged off the coast of Assateague Island just before 5 a.m. Wednesday morning, the most traveled day of the year.
Anne Bonny was tagged in April of this year, and she first pinged off the coast of North Carolina. Since then, the shark has traveled north, all the way past Massachusetts into the Canadian waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence before making her way back south. In the last 129 days, according to Ocearch’s tracking, Anne Bonny has traveled a total 4,552 miles to visit the waters off of the Virginia side of Assateague.
“Anne Bonny is our 90th white shark tagged in the Western North Atlantic and our 2nd during Expedition Northbound,” Ocearch says in their description of the shark. “She was named after the notorious female pirate that frequented the waters around Cape Hatteras in the early 1700s, near where she was tagged.”
White sharks make predictable annual migrations, Ocearch says, and spend their summer and fall mostly in the waters of New England and Canada. They then head south to warmer winter waters, from South Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico.
How long Anne Bonny remains off the coast of Delmarva remains to be seen, as does how far south she’ll travel this year.
