"Jaws" in Florida

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Monday, October 15, 7:46 AM ET



DESTIN, Fla. - Six friends went to a fishing tournament looking to catch some grouper. They caught an 844-pound shark instead.

The fight by Adlee Bruner and friends to pull the 11-foot mako shark onto the boat from the Gulf of Mexico took more than an hour on Saturday. But when they made it back to land, it was a record for the decades-old Destin Fishing Rodeo.

"It was tense," Bruner, 47, said about the fight to land the shark, which has a mouthful of huge, fearsome teeth. "I've fished for 40 years. I've never see one that big."

Bruner and his fishing buddies were on a 52-foot charter boat with Capt. Robert Hill, about 70 miles southwest of this beach city in the Florida Panhandle.

The fishermen first noticed the big mako because it kept eating grouper and scamp they had hooked.

"It was like 'Jaws,'" Hill said.

Hill hooked a two-foot amberine on as bait and tossed it out. The shark eventually hit it.

After the long fight, the shark was gaffed and eventually gave up after its tail was roped. But even then, the men could not get the big shark in the boat. They tied it to the stern with three ropes and made the four-hour trip back to land.

The shark was hoisted at the rodeo before a big crowd. It tipped the scale at 844.4 pounds.

After it was gutted, the mako still weighed 638 pounds, breaking the tournament's previous shark division record by 338 pounds.



Pic - http://news.yahoo.com/photo/071015/4...aHaBp2Aa4uQE4F

News - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071015/..._monster_shark

[Freak]

Man that thing is huge.That would be a greta story to tell to people.Wish I could land something even remotely that big.

[Disease]

That's some effort......

[GorePhobia]

That's awesome they actually were able to keep the line in tact to reel it in.

[ferretchucker]

can you imagine being on a boat and just seeing a shark appearing beside the boat out of the water. Pretty good catch. In 2005 when I was in Panama City Beach, we noticed a helicopter going up and down and we weren't aloud very far out into the sea. Well, we moved on from there and went to Georgia to see my Uncle and one week after being in Panama city beach, two people had been attacked by a shark. I think it was a mako.

[The_Raven]

That is a big mofo. The ones they catch around here look like minnows compared to that mako.


Edgar

[Disease]

Does anyone know what happend with those shark siteings in England this summer.... I heard it was a hoax?

[ferretchucker]

It was. Somebody said they had seen a great white i think, in cornwall. When it was all over the news, they confessed they thought nobody would take it seriously and it was just "a harmless joke"

[Disease]

It was realy big in the tabloids... hu ha,.,,.. Then they were reporting more sightings....

[tic]

I actually think it could have been a great white.

A while back I did some shark tagging off the west coast of scotland - basking sharks, during which several other species where recorded; porbeagle, blue and mako.

A lot of people will argue that a Great White wouldn't be seen around the british coastline, though killer whales have been seen here as well, as have atlantic bottlenose dolphins; quite regularly in the case of "flipper".

There is confirmation regarding the Mediterranean Sea, as a breeding ground for Great Whites and there's no reason why a Great White wouldn't venture further north. The Great White has been found off the coast of New Foundland, in Canada, which is (geographically in terms of water temperature) similar to the british coastal waters,and even as far as Alaska and Siberia in Russia; and the western coast has a large seal population, the shark's main diet. So there's practically no reason why the shark couldn't be found here.

The Food and Agricultural Organization within the United Nations (FAO) officially states the Great White Sharks migratory range includes the English Channel, Irish Sea and the North Sea.

A previous sighting (2004) was near the western coast of scotland near Ullapool.