I gotta agree with Paul. An 11" bite diameter doesn't seem large enough for a 20' white shark.

I saw a stuffed 18' white at Seaworld, San Diego once. The mouth was MUCH larger than a foot. Paul's 32" suggestion was more like it.

Is it possible that the shark didn't get the bite that he wanted, and only got a nibble with the front teeth?

We had a Stellar sea lion take a silver salmon off one of our lines a few weeks ago in Resurrection Bay. That fish forgot all about the hook and line problem and was performing some impressive swimming maneuvers all around our boat, with the lion right on his tail. The lion had the fish a couple of times before he got enough bite to rip the fish from the line. I was damned glad to be rid of that fish. I immediately envisioned the fish jumping into the boat, with 1000 lbs of sea lion right behind him.

I was also damned glad it was a lion and not an orca.

A co-worker and I have been discussing this, and trying to figure out if an 11" bite would come from a 20 foot shark, we're engineers, forgive us. Anyhoo, I did a web search to try and get some mouth dimensions, and according to this site:

http://homepage.mac.com/mollet/Cc/Mike_Cappo.html

A ~20' great white will have a mouth about 32" across (inner corner to inner corner)

So, probably not a 20 foot great white, but undoubtedly a hungry shark. One I would probably not want to commune with aka Timothy Treadwell

OT but had to post this one....