One of the worst, most terrifying nights of my life took place many years ago in the middle of Long Island Sound, when a large shark circled the tiny pram my friend Rocky and I were rowing from Port Jefferson, N.Y., to Milford, Conn. Until that point, our voyage had been a joyous, youthful adventure.

Because it was about 2 a.m., we never got a good look at the menacing fish, other than to observe that its dorsal fin rose almost to eye level and its length exceeded that of our 8-foot boat.

The shark eventually swam away, but ever since that awful encounter, my heart skips a beat whenever I’m in open water and hear a splash or see something poke above the surface.

In subsequent years I’ve kayaked thousands of miles in ocean waters throughout the Northeast and have come within a few yards of all manner of marine life — harbor seals, dolphins, porpoises, a giant sea turtle and even a finback whale between Port Clyde, Maine, and Monhegan Island. Rocky, to the best of my knowledge, has never boarded a small, non-motorized boat again.

There is, though, one location where I’m unlikely to dip a paddle anytime soon: Cape Cod. The reason, not surprisingly, is connected to memories of that dreadful night long ago on the sound.

In a scene earlier this week reminiscent of “Jaws,” authorities temporarily closed the Cape’s Nauset Beach facing the Atlantic Ocean after a great white shark tore apart a seal while nearby swimmers screamed and frantically scrambled for shore. Two days later, a beach in Welfleet on Cape Cod Bay also closed for a few hours after a great white chomped on a man’s paddleboard.

No humans were injured in either incident, but a dramatic increase in the number of sharks spotted off the Cape — most recently estimated to exceed 150, nearly double the population of two years ago, thanks to an influx of their favorite food, gray seals — has raised fears and prompted calls to arms.

The day after the bloody attack on the seal off Nauset Beach, Ron Beaty, commissioner for Barnstable County, proposed a “shark hazard mitigation strategy” that would hook and kill great whites that came too close to popular beaches.

He told the Boston Herald that the plan, employed in South Africa and Australia, would set up baited drum lines along popular beaches. Hooked sharks would then be shot to death, their bodies tossed out at sea.

“This shark, that attack that got videotaped off Nauset, that was very close to shore and very easily could have been a small child and not a seal,” Beaty told the newspaper. “It’s very easy for these sharks to mistake a person for a seal. They’re just looking for something to eat. God forbid it’s somebody’s child, and by that time, it’s too late. We can’t wait for that.”

I have a better idea that doesn’t involve killing wild creatures solely for the recreational and financial benefit of humans: Don’t go in the water when there are sharks nearby. Use lifeguards, air patrols or even drones to detect them and post warnings. Admittedly, this would be cumbersome and not completely foolproof, but the fact remains that shark attacks on humans are exceedingly rare, only amplified by a 24-hour news cycle and social media postings by everybody armed with cellphone video cameras.

Greg Skomal, a biologist with the state Division of Marine Fisheries who’s studied sharks for more than 30 years, was quoted as saying the last shark attack of a person in Massachusetts was in 2012 off Truro. The last fatal shark attack on a human was in 1936 off Mattapoisett.

Last month, Wendy Benchley, the widow of “Jaws” author Peter Benchley, who spent many summers at their home on Elihu Island in Stonington, told an audience at the borough’s La Grua Center she and her husband regretted all the bad human behavior that followed the book’s publication in 1974 and the movie’s release a year later.

“'Jaws' changed our lives forever. It opened up a world for us,” she told The Day, describing their worldwide travels to dive with marine life. “We also saw the terrible destruction humans had caused.”

Shark hunting became a trophy sport, spurred on by trolls who felt they were performing a valuable service by ridding the oceans of a dangerous predator.

Benchley disavowed that notion, telling this newspaper, “We know sharks are not man eaters. They don’t eat people. We’re too bony and we don’t taste good. While a test bite can be serious, they generally test bite, spit you out and go on.”

I applaud Benchley and a number of international organizations that work to preserve, not destroy, sharks and other creatures that sometimes interfere with our quality, not to mention essence, of life.

I realize my attitude might be different if I owned a surfboard rental business or beach house on Cape Cod, but we’d all be better off — wildlife and humans alike — if people adhered less to the decree in Genesis 1:26 that granted man “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” and more to the survival-of-the-fittest principles espoused by Charles Darwin.

Sometimes, though, as the great naturalist wrote in “The Voyage of the Beagle,” such an all-mighty attitude ultimately proves self-destructive: “Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants.”

Either way, I’m more than willing to concede inferiority to sharks and keep my distance.