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Nine-Foot-Shark Hooked Off Cornwall Coast, But It’s No Great White

By Dustin Wicksell
Published on: 05:06 PST, May 22, 2015

A British fisherman was shocked recently when he hooked a nine-foot-long porbeagle shark off the coast of Cornwall, fighting the 400-pund-predator for over an hour before photographing one of the biggest sharks ever recorded in the region.

Angler Mark Nelson hooked the shark while on an 18-foot-long charter boat, roughly four miles off the coast of Boscastle in Cornwall. As the Metro reports, the 45-year-old builder, who hails from from Mountain Ash in Wales, used a mackerel as a lure to attract the shark, which startled him with its ability to fight back.

“I had caught a 300lb shark the day before and I was over the moon with that one. But it felt like I had hooked into a submarine in comparison when I caught the bigger one the next day,” Nelson recalled. “It took me an hour and a half to get it to the boat. It had so much power and aggression. My arms were aching a lot afterwards and had pins and needles.”

At nine-feet-long, the porbeagle shark measured roughly half the length of the boat Nelson was fishing from, making it too large to bring aboard. The angler, however, was satisfied with simply photographing and measuring the shark after his 90 minute fight to best the animal. Jerry Rogers, who captained the charter boat that Nelson was on, was responsible for photographing the shark and estimating its weight based on the length and girth of the animal.

According to Rogers’ calculations, the porbeagle shark represents one of the largest sharks ever hooked in the region. As the Daily Mail reports, the record belongs to a 14-foot-long thresher shark, which was caught in 2013 off the Isle of Wight. That shark weighed in excess of 550 lbs.

A relative of the great white shark, the porbeagle is considered common in British waters, though the species poses little danger to humans. They are hardly the only sharks that call the area home, as large basking sharks have been sighted off the coast in recent months. Last year, a massive shark was spotted in the region, as the Inquisitr previously reported. Though its species wasn’t readily apparent, the sighting led to fears that a 14-foot-long great white shark could be swimming off the coast of Cornwall.

[Image: Jerry Rogers BNPS via the Daily Mail]

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