If you think Florida Gulf coast beaches are shark free, take a parasail ride and think again.

There they are, those scary shadows that we vainly hope are dolphins holding their breath for a really, really, long time.

But the small sharks that swim within sight of the beach, like the 9-foot hammerhead caught from the shoreline of Bradenton Beach a few years back, are nothing compared to several April reports of seriously big sharks in the Gulf of Mexico.

On April 10, a boater caught a 668-pound mako off Destin, where Jaws II was filmed.

On April 15, an 800-pound, 11-foot mako was caught by a fisherman standing on a beach in the Florida Panhandle.

On April 23, closer to home, a 692-pound mako was caught 25 miles offshore off Longboat Pass in 100 feet of water, the second big mako caught by charter guests of Capt. Nicholas Froelich this year.

But that mako – so big that the crew had to travel to Cortez to find a fish house with a scale big enough to weigh it – was merely half the size of the 1,400 pound Betsy, a 12-foot 7-inch great white shark spotted with a satellite tagging system on April 25 some 63 miles off Boca Grande, about 75 miles due south of Anna Maria Island, as the shark swims. Betsy is part of a tagging program that located bull shark Sabrina (8 feet 6 inches long) in June last year inside – yes, inside – Charlotte Harbor at Boca Grande, and bull shark Gina (8 feet 2 inches long) near the mouth of Charlotte Harbor in July, near where a record 14.5-foot, 1,262-pound great hammerhead was caught in 2006 and weighed at Cortez.

The day after Betsy’s tag was pinged on April 26, divers about 80 miles off Sanibel Island, about 130 miles south of Anna Maria Island, encountered a 14-foot great white, and took a video to prove it (“Ay, ay, iz a gade whyd,” one shouts, muffled by his regulator).

Great whites are nothing new around here either.

Froelich, of Sarasota, said his crew released a great white on Feb. 17.

At the end of North Shore Road on Longboat Key, a marker commemorates a fisherman landing a 17-foot great white in 1937, estimated at one ton.

But, as evidenced by April’s news, shark reports seem to be coming more frequently.

Did BP oil and dispersant contamination drive big sharks closer to shore? Are fisheries management programs working, as evidenced by flourishing top predators? Or has the water always been teeming with, or infested by, sharks, and we’re just getting better at finding these denizens of the deep?

Betsy was satellite tagged on the M/V OCEARCH research vessel by a team including scientists from Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, who insist they never said, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

At www.ocearch.org, you can track Betsy and other really big sharks off the Gulf coast of Florida and worldwide, so you can either get in a boat and go diving with them or choose a beach far, far away.

But in case you think high tech tags will fully protect you, remember that great white off Sanibel videotaped less than two weeks ago?

It didn’t have one.