SALISBURY (CBS) – An experienced West Newbury fisherman thought he’d seen everything on the water, until a 14-foot long shark slammed into his boat on the North Shore.

“I could see something coming across very quickly and I look over and I could see the water welling up, and it wasn’t small, it was big,” says Alan Montello.

WBZ NewsRadio 1030′s Bernice Corpuz reports

Montello, 63, says he could not believe what he saw fishing for blue fish off the waters of Newburyport. At first he thought it was a tuna. But it didn’t take long before he realized it was a great white shark.

“It was moving very fast, I’d say 10 to 20 miles an hour,” recalls Montello. “When it turned up on its side it was like 4×8 sheet of plywood.”

In recent months, great white sightings have been reported off the waters of Chatam in Cape Cod. And this summer a man was bitten by a shark off Ballston Beach in Truro. In Montello’s encounter, the great white inhaled some blue fish and was gone.

Montello says it only lasted a moment, but it’s an image he says he’ll never forget.

He says, “It’s one of those images you’ll take to the grave with you.”

Montello has been fishing for more than 50 years and says the shark he saw was about 14-feet long about 1,500 pounds.