Hawaiian surfer shares unsettling encounter with 20-foot great white: 'That's a shark!'

An experienced foil surfer in Oahu, Hawaii, came across a 20-foot long shadow that he initially thought was a whale, but turned out to be a great white shark.

"I was foiling down the coast and I saw this huge shadow, about 20 feet long," Kapule said. "And being a curious person, I rode my board towards it, and I'm like, "Oh, this is a huge whale." "That's not a whale, that's a shark!" "The ocean is their home and not our, and we need to respect that." Sarah Rumpf-Whitten is a writer on the breaking news team for Fox News Digital. You can reach her on Twitter at @s_rumpfwhitten.

The curious surfer quickly realized that it was not a whale. Upon closer inspection, he saw a razor sharp tail fin emerge from the water.

"As I get closer and closer, I see this huge tail fin come out of the water, it was 4 to 5 feet [of] tail and super sharp," Kapule recalled. "I got chills, and I was like, wait, that's not a whale, that's a shark!"