A huge mako shark was caught in the Gulf of Mexico after an hour long fight last week, and the animal weighed in at over 500 pounds, large enough to rank fourth in Louisiana’s record books.
A group of men from North Dakota set out on a charter with Captain Kevin Beach from Venice, Louisiana, on Friday, seeking tuna and marlin, according to the Houston Chronicle . After just a short time, however, they spotted a massive mako shark.
Beach and his crew were chumming the water near Midnight Lump, south of Venice, and had encountered king mackerel, tuna, and small sharks before they noticed the mako.
None of these in Fargo. Big mako shark caught in Gulf – Houston Chronicle http://t.co/t60mfDHYbb via @HoustonChron pic.twitter.com/s4t0AIuzHt
— donholt99 (@donholt99) December 17, 2014
“We first saw him about 70, 80 yards down the chum slick, just swimming all lit up, blue and pretty, on the surface,” Beach recalled.
“We got the mako rod, and offered him a bait.”
Beach attempted to lure the shark with a bonito, yet the predator wasn’t interested.
“There was something about that bait he just didn’t like, so I grabbed a fillet off a 30-pound king mackerel, and I don’t know if it was the action of that long fillet just flapping in the water, or if he just wanted something a little bit fresher than the bonito, but it hit the water, got about 10 feet down, and he just swam up and sucked it down,” Beach noted.
As soon as the mako was hooked, Beach recalled that it jumped out of the water four times, according to the Times-Picayune . The shark fought against angler Landon Rachel of Jamestown, N.D., for a full hour before he was able to bring the mako boatside, where Beach slipped a rope over its tail. After the shark had expired, five men used a flying gaff to bring the massive mako aboard Beach’s 37 foot boat.
The shark measured an astonishing 117.5 inches from the lower jaw to the tail fork. Beach and his crew brought the mako to Cypress Cove Marina’s certified scale, where the shark weighed in at 580 pounds, ranking fourth in Louisiana’s record books. Another client of Beach’s caught a mako in 2006 that weighed 765 pounds, the second heaviest ever recorded in the state.
.This miracle of evolution is a shortfin mako shark. @TheIGFA world record (dead) is 553.84kg http://t.co/5b4bhYEqxY pic.twitter.com/Izl73Y3m1G — Blue Planet Society (@Seasaver) October 24, 2014
Earlier this year, an angler in the Gulf of Mexico landed a massive tiger shark that weighed 809 pounds. As the Inquisitr previously reported, the predator was so large that the fishermen were only able to hoist it atop their boat’s step to transport it back to shore.
Makos are considered an extremely aggressive shark species and one of the most fearsome predators in the Gulf of Mexico.
[Images: Kevin Beach via the Houston Chronicle ]
