For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a boundless fascination with sharks. Long before Jaws, which I saw at an inappropriately early age, there was a painting at the Museum of Fine Arts that completely captured my imagination: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark. It depicts the true story of cabin boy Brook Watson, who was attacked by a shark in Havana Harbor in 1749. (He lived to tell the tale, and the painting launched Copley’s career in London.) As a 6-year-old, I was mesmerized by the documentary Blue Water, White Death, and as an adult, the advent of Shark Week on Discovery Channel made watching TV in August seem almost worthwhile. If pressed for something to watch on a long-haul flight, I might actually choose Sharknado.

The obsession persists. I’ve been scuba diving with sharks in the Red Sea, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. When I try to focus my mind, I often think of a dive when a 6-foot white-tipped shark swam parallel to me for a few thrilling moments. But the one thing I’ve always wanted to see is a great white shark in the wild.

Carcharodon carcharias, the apex predator with which Steven Spielberg forever soured a generation on dipping a toe in the ocean, is the ne plus ultra of sharks for me, and there’s a strangely sacred quality to the sentiment. As a child, I went to a shark tournament in Montauk and witnessed a great white hanging by its tail, its organs spilling out through its teeth onto the dock. It was a deeply depressing, ignominious sight. I’ve heard countless yarns from fishermen friends—some believable, most not—about close encounters. I know a number of people who have gone cage-diving in South Africa or Australia and been within a (well-armored) arm’s reach, but there’s something staged and contrived about this experience (and scientists theorize that these sharks have become conditioned to human contact).

In 2004, a great white was entrapped in a tidal inlet on a private island off Cape Cod. I was transfixed by the news coverage and desperately wanted to go see it. Since then, I’ve visited the island, and the very first thing I asked my hostess to show me was the photo album of the shark. It was distressed, looking for deeper water, but nevertheless, it was a magnificent sight. That was the way I wanted to encounter this animal I admire so tremendously: organically, on its own turf, and on its own terms.

For 100 years, Chatham Bars Inn has sat high on the bluff, like a dowager empress, overlooking the part of the harbor known as Aunt Lydia’s Cove and two small barrier islands beyond it. It’s a hub of socializing in this quaint yet elegant Cape Cod town, and on nice summer days, the thwack of tennis balls mingles with the laughter of diners at the Beach House, the squawk of seagulls and the squeals of children playing on the beach.

Sometime during the last decade, though, something significant happened. The seal population rebounded, accompanied by the animals that like to snack on them: great white sharks.

Gregory Skomal is a senior scientist with the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries who’s studying the increased shark presence along the outer Cape. Since 2009, he’s tagged 41 great whites ranging in size from 8 to 18 feet.

“The numbers seem to be increasing,” he says, describing the population as “similar to the town’s. There are summer residents and tourists. Within the shark group, some stop by for a few days; others stay all season. But in July and August, they’re here.”

Skomal has been studying sharks for 32 years and says the highest concentration of great whites is “in the area we call ‘Shark Cove,’ off Monomoy Island.”

As for the danger to swimmers: “All we can go on is risk assessments based on statistics, and shark attacks are so rare, the statistics are terrible. There was the guy from Colorado who was bitten in Truro in 2012, and the last shark attack in Massachusetts before that was in 1936.”

Still, one might expect Chatham—with its high property values and reliance on tourism—to react the way the mayor of Amity does in Jaws: initial denial, followed by a blood-thirsty cry to rid the surrounding waters of these monsters.

Instead, Chatham has chosen to embrace its sharks, or at least to make lemons into lemonade. The Chatham Shark Center, whose mission is to promote “education, awareness, preservation and conservation for the great white shark [and its] presence in Chatham,” was founded in 2013 by a group of civic-minded residents.

“We’re on track to open in 2014,” says trustee Paul Litwin, spreading out architectural renderings of the museum on a table in the lobby of Chatham Bars Inn. “We want people to understand and appreciate what an important part of the ocean environment these animals are, and to translate people’s fear into fascination.”

Lisa Franz, a fellow trustee and the executive director of Chatham’s Chamber of Commerce, adds, “We already have all these tourists coming into town, saying, ‘Where can I see a great white shark?’ The joke was to tell them to go down to the Fish Pier and wait, because the seals love to eat the scraps the fishermen throw over. But the answer seemed to be to build a facility to satisfy their curiosity and hopefully help raise funds for research and conservation.”

Meanwhile, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy (AWSC), founded by naturalist Cynthia Wigren, directly supports Skomal’s research, providing the tagging vessel and funding for tagging equipment and operations. (While Skomal receives a salary from the state, all the money for his field work comes from donations and grants.)

“The biggest expense is the spotter plane,” Wigren explains. “One of our board members has donated both his boat and his time for the two days a week from June to October that we’re out on the water, but all that flying time adds up.”

Last summer, Chatham Bars Inn approached the conservancy with the concept of offering its guests a shark research experience—time on the water to discuss Skomal’s work with one of the volunteers and look for shark-related activity—with a portion of the proceeds helping to fund the AWSC. Needless to say, this piqued my interest the way blood in the water catches a great white’s attention.

On a rainy July morning, I headed down to the inn’s dock to meet Marianne Long, a conservancy volunteer. We boarded the inn’s 29-foot custom launch, punnily named the Bar Tender, which was skippered by the fresh-faced Jarred Riel.

As we got out into the middle of the harbor, Long pointed out a green buoy in the channel. It was equipped with a receiver. Whenever a tagged shark swims within a few hundred yards of it, the device records the identity of the shark, the date and the time. (To allay swimmers’ fears: Only a few sharks are detected every summer, and there’s little reason to believe that the sharks actually do follow the seals over to their free lunch at the Fish Pier.)

Despite the steady drizzle, Long risked her laptop to download the receiver’s data. Then we set out for the barrier islands. Unremarkable from a distance, they soon resolve into a writhing mass of gray seals, so thick you can’t see the sand underneath them. Because the Bar Tender has a remarkably shallow draft, Riel was able to maneuver us within feet of the shore, and as we approached, seals peeled off the beach and into the water like corpulent triathletes, issuing pissed-off barks and indignant snorts. We were surrounded by hundreds of intelligent-looking heads, bobbing in the water and staring at us with as much curiosity as we regarded them.

Long explained that some of the seals bitten by sharks escape or are released, so one of the things we looked for was bleeding or scarring on the seals still on the beach.

“Some people don’t love this part,” she said.

“So…what are our actual chances of seeing a shark out here today?” I finally brought myself to ask.

“Realistically?” she said. “Pretty close to none.”

Good news for the beachgoers in Chatham. Bad news for me. Did I want to see one? Certainly. Did I honestly expect to? No. It’s not like great white sharks come when you whistle, and even if we’d had a boatload of chum, it would still be an incredible long shot. But I understood more about great whites than I did before, and, more importantly, I appreciated how little we actually know about them.

This summer, the conservancy began funding a population study that’s expected to take the next three to five years, but Skomal thinks that the population is on the rise. In fact, just two weeks after my excursion, he tagged a 12-footer off Chatham’s coast. So I still stand a chance of encountering a great white sometime when I’m out on the water. And in the meantime, I’m just happy to know they’re out there.