‘Shark!’: Tennessee vacationers have up-close ocean encounter in North Myrtle Beach

Al Kozlowski likes to “live on the edge,” according to his wife of 25 years.

Well, the couple’s first trip to Myrtle Beach provided just that opportunity earlier this week.

Having been in town since last Sunday as part of a vacation to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, Tuesday was the first day Al and Jennifer Kozlowski took in a beach day with relatives Mark and Deb Brownell in the Cherry Grove area of North Myrtle Beach.

It turned into a once-in-a-lifetime sight for the four Tennessee residents.

“We were actually all in the water probably up to our knees and I saw a fin and I went ‘Shark!’ and I took off booking, and my husband was like ‘What? You’re funny. Haha.’ Well, no. Then they all saw the fin, so we all kind of backed up,” said Jennifer Kozlowski, who noted the sighting happened between 11:30 a.m. and noon. “We were just like ‘Oh, I guess we’re not going to have a beach day today because I’m not going in the water anymore.’ Then he kind of disappeared.”

Jennifer Kozlowski went back to get her phone and walked down the beach in the direction the shark seemed to be headed and then saw it again with another one. She captured photos and video of the animals, which she estimated both to be 4 or 5 feet long.

“It was kind of 15 or 20 minutes watching them and then they just disappeared,” Jennifer Kozlowski said from Charlotte, North Carolina, where the couple are continuing their vacation after leaving North Myrtle Beach on Thursday. “At first we thought maybe they were beached and they couldn’t get back out.”

Jennifer Kozlowski said her husband expressed the desire to catch the animal — while noting he had no realistic plan to do it nor an idea of what to do with it if he’d gotten it — or push it back out to deeper water as he likes to “live on the edge.”

In days leading up to the sighting Al Kozlowski had joked with his wife about spotting a shark while they were walking the beach.

Hence the reason he thought she was crying wolf Tuesday.

“We go to Florida yearly and had never seen a shark,” said Jennifer Kozlowski, whose video shows the sharks in water appearing just a few feet deep. “That kind of had me freaked out.”

Nonetheless, about an hour later Al Kozlowski and Mark Brownell were back in the water on boogie boards having a blast. Jennifer Kozlowski and Deb Brownell, however, decided they’d spend the rest of the afternoon in chairs on the beach.

In the end, the event left the Kozlowskis — who live in Nashville — and the Brownells — Mount Juliet residents — with a heck of a story to tell.

“It was a cool experience to witness it for the first time,” Jennifer Kozlowski said. “It’s a we’ll-probably-never-see-it-again type of thing. It was pretty cool to see that up close.”

This story was originally published September 28, 2019 at 5:00 PM.