Twice in two days, great white sharks snack on stripers caught in Cape Cod Bay

For the second time in two days, guests on the sport fishing boat Aquarius had hooked nicely sized stripers during their trips to Cape Cod Bay, a body of water Captain Jeff Kadesh has sailed on for some 50 years.

And for the second time in two days, great white sharks arrived just as the guests were reeling in their catches. The first shark, Kadesh said in a telephone interview Wednesday, rose unexpectedly from below.

“It actually came right out of the water like a missile, straight up like a torpedo,’’ Kadesh said of the shark encounter from last Saturday. “I got a good look at that one.”

The shark devoured all but the head of that striper, said Kadesh, who operates Aquarius Sportfishing in Barnstable harbor.

On Sunday, another guest had hooked a striper that weighed around 35 pounds and was north of three feet in length, he said. As another guest shot video the encounter, the guest was reeling her catch in when the sharply angled fins of a great white broke the surface.

“The great white shark came up and just jumped on the fish,’’ Kadesh said. “And then the shark stayed with the fish and followed right up to the boat, which is unusual.”

All that remained of the encounter off Brewster was the striper’s head and a small portion of its body.

The video captured images of the shark as it swam right next to Kadesh’s 35-foot boat. He estimated that the shark was 12 to 14 feet in length. He also said he thinks the two attacks involved two different sharks.

The video of the encounter was shared with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, the nonprofit research partner of the state Division of Marine Fisheries, and was posted to the group’s Facebook page.

Kadesh said that over the years he’s seen basking sharks and blue sharks in Cape Cod Bay, and in the past occasionally spotted a great white shark. In the past two years, he said, the number of great whites has dramatically increased — as has the number of times a guest loses a fish to one.

“It’s exciting for our customers to see, but by the same token, it’s an element we are dealing with that we never had to in the past,’’ he said. “I’ve been doing this a long time and years ago we never used to see shark attacks. Now it’s almost an every day occurrence where you hear someone has been bitten off.”

Kadesh said clients rarely mentioned sharks before leaving the harbor. Now, he said, nearly every time the charter boat sails guests say they hope to see a great white during the trip, which is something the family on board last Sunday did.

“Nobody is in danger or jeopardy when they are fishing, at least on charter boats,’’ he said. “But I wouldn’t want to be swimming in the area. I wouldn’t want to be wind surfing in the area. . . . To have that occur two days in a row, that never, ever used to happen.”