Bros! This is some exclusive/original content from right here in my little corner of the world. This video was taken last weekend by my cousin’s friend who was tarpon fishing off of Anna Maria Island with Captain Dennis Machado. I was at a wedding on Chebeague Island, Maine last weekend or I would’ve shared this crazy footage with you all sooner, and I probably would’ve remembered more details about the video if I wasn’t so wedding drunk when they showed me the clip and sent it to me to share with you all.
Anyways, this is easily the largest hammerhead shark I’ve seen in my lifetime, and it’s also quite possibly the angriest/hungriest as well. This freight train of a hammerhead shark swims up out of nowhere, zeroes in on the tarpon (that’s the type of fish in this video for those of you that aren’t familiar with tarpon), and wouldn’t you know it that shark manages to tag that fish before anyone knew what was happening:
The angler above is my cousin’s friend Aaron (their Stryker rep), and he was fishing with live bait off of Anna Maria Island with Captain Dennis Machado of Tampa Bay Guide Services. You can book your own fishing charter with him by following that link to Tampa Bay Guide Services (find his Instagram HERE), and you should SERIOUSLY consider booking a tarpon fishing charter because it’s one of the most exciting fishing excursions you’ll ever experience, 100% a bucket list item for every bro that likes to fish.
So for those of you that aren’t familiar with tarpon they are probably the most sought after game fish in the state of Florida. On the Gulf Coast of Florida from Naples to Tampa Bay the tarpon show up this time of year in huge schools, they can weigh over 300 pounds and measure over 7-feet in length. Their nickname is the ‘Silver King’ and local fishermen devote their entire lives to catching these majestic fish. With that in mind it shouldn’t surprise you that NOBODY every keeps tarpon when they catch them, at best you might just keep a single silver scale from the fish but more often than not you just measure and photograph the fish if you wish to later have a replica mount produced.
When these tarpon show up this time of year in Southwest Florida so do the sharks, primarily the hammerhead sharks who love tarpon as much as I love a good bone-in ribeye steak. Tarpon are like crack to the hammerheads and they show up in HUGE numbers, especially around the Boca Grande pass. Standard protocol is if you’re fighting a tarpon and see one of these sharks pop up you pop open the bail of the reel and let the tarpon swim freely (no drag on the reel) to escape the shark because the hammerhead will eventually tire itself out and give up. Unfortunately they weren’t able to do that in this video because everything happened so quickly, but if you ever find yourself fishing in that position now you know what to do!
Also, if any of you tarpon fishing captains in Southwest Florida (I’m in the Sarasota area) are reading this and want to go fishing with BroBible just hit me up via email (cass@brobible.com) and we we can bust out the GoPro and get some awesome footage up here on the site!