"Monster shark" spotted at popular Australian beach

A mother has captured video of a "monster shark" at a popular Victorian tourist destination.

Carla Charlton said she was enjoying nice weather over the Easter long weekend at a beach in Warrnambool, 250 km west of Melbourne, when she started to film a nearby seal.

"I was just trying to take a video of a cute little seal that I saw there and then it disappeared and then all of a sudden these two little fins pop-up," Charlton told local radio station Coast FM on Wednesday.

She said that the two fins belonged to a "massive shark."

Charlton, who lives 330 km east of Warrnambool in Mornington, said her kids were jumping into and playing in the water just seconds before the shark was spotted.

"A couple of guys ran over and told them to get out of the water," she said. "It just sort of came, meandered around."

The seal that Charlton initially started to film was not spotted again after the shark arrived.

The number of large shark sightings off Victoria's coast has soared in recent years with 46 reported sightings from November 2016 to February 2017, a 350 percent increase on the 13 sightings in the entire previous summer.

Dallas D'Silva, director of Fisheries Victoria, said environmental factors such as warmer currents and healthy fish stocks were responsible for the increase.

The popular Warrnambool beach was closed for a day in February after a shark was sighted killing a seal off the coast.

A group of Melbourne tradesman caught a 291.8-kg mako shark off the coast of the nearby Port Fairy in January, the largest fish ever caught in the area. Endit