About five years ago a GW took an Italian fisherman's catch. He videoed it and it was on TV... they definitely are about. it is thought that they go to med to give birth. Baby GWs were often seen around Cabo Verde islands in the 1970s.
There are stacks of GWs around Malta and they even proposed conservation programmes for them in 1999.
A total of 41 reliably-reported interactions involving direct unprovoked attacks on humans are recorded from the region of the Med. (not many in comparison to other areas). Fatalities were recorded in 49% of these cases and the great white shark was confirmed or reliably attributed as implicated in 54% of the total cases. The majority of Mediterranean cases have occurred (in decreasing order) within Italian, Croatian and Greek coastal waters.
A study by Ian Ferguson showed the following:
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Cosmopolitan but rather infrequent or rare; from Gibraltar to the Bosphorus (not Black Sea) but more regular in Western and Central Mediterranean, all coasts but especially Western Sicily (Egadi Islands), Sicilian Channel and Tunisian Coasts from Cape Bon to Djerba; Maltese archipelago; occasional in Gulf of Lyons (Sete, Palavas & Grau-du-Rois), Côte d'Azur (now sporadic); Ligurian Sea (Varazze, Genova, south to La Spezia), Tyrrhenian Sea (Isola d'Elba; Sardinia; San Felice Circeo) and Ionian Sea, Calabria / Messina; once frequent in Northern Adriatic until 1970's, now sporadic and generally encountered on the former Yugoslavian side (Kvarner Gulf and Dalmatia); sporadic in the Aegean, generally northerly sites (Thermaikos, Thassos, Kavalla, Foça); sporadic off Cyprus, Lebanon and Israel ('Akko); captures from Libya, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco poorly documented although the species is recorded on these coasts.
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They are out there guys... but unlikely to be encountered close to the coasts.
Another thought... GW eat fish for the first few years of their life and then switch to mammals.. so as full on adults they would have to live in areas closer to their diet.
