Last weekend I saw a video on Facebook of some guys kayak fishing. It sounded nice until you realized one of them was hot on the heels of a shark.

And it wasn’t just a small shark, this one was about the size of the kayak – 4.9 metres. I was totally intrigued and maybe a little worried because the video had been posted on a couple of Sunshine Coast Facebook pages and the location was given as “Half Moon Bay”. (I had already made up the caption in my head.)

So I decided to track these guys down by leaving messages on their Instagram pages and, while I waited for a response, sent a couple of queries, one to the DFO and one to the University of British Columbia (UBC).

In the meantime, I made contact with the man who was being chased by the shark and he had quite an exciting story to tell, although, he explained, the incident occurred in Half Moon Bay, California, and not on our Sunshine Coast.

For me, and hopefully others, it was a great reminder of why it’s so important to check your sources before sharing information on social media.

And after he stopped laughing at my story, I had a very interesting conversation with Daniel Pauly, the lead researcher of Sea Around Us, a UBC research initiative based at the Institute for Oceans and Fisheries.

Pauly assured me that despite the migration of some fish species due to global warming, large sharks are not common in West Coast waters. He noted that the elusive sixgill shark, while present in our waters, poses no threat to humans.

“Sharks have every reason to be afraid of us,” he said. “And they usually only attack things that are half their size or smaller.”

He also introduced me to the fascinating website FishBase (fishbase.se/search.php), where you can find everything you ever wanted to know about fish from all over the world.