{"id":635353,"date":"2026-08-13T17:01:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T17:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/635353\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T17:01:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T17:01:22","slug":"maine-shark-sighting-leads-to-closure-of-wells-beach-nbc-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/635353\/","title":{"rendered":"Maine shark sighting leads to closure of Wells Beach \u2013 NBC Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"

A great white shark was spotted off of Wells Beach in Maine on Wednesday morning, and officials have closed the beach to swimming for the rest of the day.<\/p>\n

“This morning there was a sighting of an approximately 10 foot juvenile great white shark off of Wells Beach,” the Wells Fire Department said in a Facebook post. “This sighting is consistent with other recent sightings off the coast of Southern Maine. Out of an abundance of caution Lifeguards will be flying the purple flag at all stands for the entire day today. There will be no swimming allowed on Wells Beaches while the purple flag is flying.”<\/p>\n

The shark sighting is just the latest in a series of recent sightings off the Maine coast.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, a lifeguard at Scarborough Beach State park was dragged by a great white shark and pulled 5-6 feet below the surface of the water<\/a> before he was able to free himself from the strap attached to the rescue device and swim safely back to shore.<\/p>\n

This came just days after several sharks were spotted in the waters off Pine Point Beach<\/a>, which is also in Scarborough.<\/p>\n

Based on the growing number of shark sightings, the Marine Department of Marine Resources is encouraging people take precautions, including avoiding excessive splashing, avoiding wearing shiny jewelry that could resemble fish scales and avoiding swimming at dawn or dusk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A great white shark was spotted off of Wells Beach in Maine on Wednesday morning, and officials have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[273],"tags":[18,19,17,11447,133,15057,461],"class_list":["post-635353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-maine","tag-science","tag-sharks","tag-wildlife"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117089277433470852","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}