Beached great white shark saved by beachgoers - video

A group of people at a beach in Chatham, Massachusetts, managed to save a stranded great white shark in a rescue that was caught on camera.

The unusual sighting of the beached 7.5ft shark drew a sizeable crowd, who watched as people kept it alive by dousing it with buckets of seawater.

"I was a little afraid but I could tell it wasn't moving anytime soon because the shore was going way out," one witness told CBS Boston. "it was approaching towards low tide so it was becoming increasingly difficult for the shark to keep its gills wet and be able to breathe."

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Another witness said "there was no way for the shark to get to where it could swim, so it just kept flapping and moving over".

The shark had apparently become stranded by the receding tide while chasing seagulls, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The crowd continued splashing the shark for more than 90 minutes until state shark scientist Greg Skomal arrived with a team to tow it along the sand and back out to sea. It took a motorboat to drag the shark into the water.

The juvenile shark was "still alive but very sluggish, barely moving, so we put a tag on it", Skomal told CBS. They then strapped the shark to the side of their boat and took it to deeper water, where it was released and is said to have survived.