iStockphoto / HakBak1979
It’s fishing season all throughout the Gulf Coast of America. The tarpon have mostly left but the sharks are still around. If you’re a fisherman or a regular BroBible reader, then you’ve already heard me discuss at length how tarpon are like a dry-aged Ribe-Eye steak to hammerheads sharks.
Tarpon tend to stick close to the beaches and that means the hammerheads do as well, and this means that anglers fishing from the beach have a shot at catching one of these behemoth sharks. Last weekend, a Texas angler landed a 14-foot hammerhead so big he “only dreamed about” catching something this size.
Angler Poco Cedillo fought the massive hammerhead for over an hour off Corpus Christi, Texas before getting it to the beach where he left the shark in the water while taking some measurements before releasing it. Unfortunately, it was at that time that they realized the massive hammerhead was on her last leg and wasn’t going to make it after being exhausted from the fight:
The angler shared his story of fighting the enormous shark and trying to revive it on Facebook:
Well after 30-40 min of us holding her up into the current in 3-4’ of water we were faced with accepting the fact that she was done. We were so tired, shark rashed and disappointed that it sucked the excitement right out of us for a while.
Now for most of us that live for land based shark fishing this was something that we never wanted to go through. We then decided that since we couldn’t get her released we were going to do everything we could to save the meat so thats what we did. 5-6 of us went to work and Im happy to say that all meat was saved, cooled down and donated. While cutting meat we found a total of 15 barbs stuck well inside the meat from the head to the tail. Crazy!
You never, ever like to see a story where a shark like this loses its life and those massive genes are taken out of the gene pool, but it sounds like they tried their hardest to revive the shark before accepting what had happened and then donating the meet to try and add some positive to the situation.
You can read more about this massive shark catch over on AJC.com or WYFF4.