After fishing for 25 hours without a bite, Florida anglers Elliot Sudal and Clayton Jennings were heading in Monday morning when they decided to stop at a sandbar to wash off and give it one last try with the last remaining bait.
Five minutes later, Sudal hooked up and began a battle that would last six hours and result in landing a tiger shark measuring 13 feet, 2 inches and weighing a calculated 1,100 pounds with its nearly 7-foot girth.
“This shark was a monster, probably the largest ever landed in the area at over 1,100 pounds,” Sudal told For The Win Outdoors.
Sudal is used to catching sharks—he participates in the National Marine Fisheries Apex Predator Tagging Program with NOAA Fisheries, according to FOX 13—but this was the “largest shark I’ve ever caught.”
Sudal detailed his catch in an Instagram post.
They were fishing off Boca Grande in an area where giant sharks are known to congregate to feed on the tarpon that are there this time of year.
Exhausted and frustrated, they decided to head home to Sanibel, near Fort Myers. They stopped at a Captiva Island sandbar.
“I had one bonito left that had already been soaking for 12 hours, figured what the heck, why not?” Sudal explained. “Five minutes later, it gets smoked. It was the heaviest, most consistently unstoppable run of my life, not even slowing down at full drag.”
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With only 100 feet of line remaining on the reel, the fishermen jumped into the boat and started backing down on the fish “marlin style.”
After five hours of getting pulled around, they managed to return to the sandbar where it would be easier to handle the large tiger shark.
“I’ve never dealt with a shark this size, and in my experience they are much easier to tag, blood sample and remove the hook when in shallow water,” Sudal wrote. “Plus the shark was almost as big as the boat.
“I finished the battle on the sand, keeping the shark in 2 feet of water on a sandbar at the edge of the pass, so the flowing current would keep water moving over his gills.”
The fishermen completed the tagging, measurements and taking of a blood sample, and then released the shark, which “took off like a champ.”
Sudal called it an “unreal experience.”
“Tiger sharks are a rare species to see here, and it’s a great sign at how strong the shark populations are returning after the red tide [last] summer, Sudal wrote.
Photos courtesy of Elliot Sudal.
