Craig Strong was fishing for tuna at the Regal Sword last Friday, September 13th when he found himself shorthanded with a monster thresher on the line. He sent the recap of this exciting story to Rich at The Hook-Up in Orleans, MA, who forwarded it to us.
My name is Craig Strong, and I live in Springfield, MA. I was fishing with Henry Mikucki from Westfield, MA on Friday the 13th. We were trolling splash bars for tuna in the Regal Sword area. We had a 6 rod spread out. One bar had run up on another bar’s line, and Henry slowed the boat to idle speed so I could straighten it out.
Suddenly we saw something big slapping at our pink bar with a rainbow stinger, throwing a spray of water through the air with each swipe. We recognized it as a thresher shark, and I told Henry to speed up the boat before it bit off our spreader bar. As Henry accelerated to pull away from it, the determined shark went after the lure with a vengeance, unwilling to let such an appetizing meal escape.
After a few more quick smashes on the stinger lure, its tail finally found the single hook. When it realized it was hooked, it took off and made two spectacular leaps, clearing the surface with only the very tip of its tail still in the water. We cleared two of the other lines and realized that we had to back down after this fish, as it was running off to the side and taking a substantial amount of line off the Shimano TLD 50 reel. As I struggled to adjust the drag lever and recover some line, I could see a problem developing.
With only two of us on board, we were short handed, and couldn’t clear the other lines fast enough. The mother of all tangles formed of the stern, as the other bars, each with 15 teasers and a stinger squid, came together in a tangled mess around the line the shark was attached to. We stopped, cleared everything away, and resumed the fight.
Finally we got the tired fish to the side of the boat and tail roped it. It was substantially bigger than we had expected. Now we had another problem. How could two of us, with no tuna door on the transom and no lifting equipment on board, get this huge beast into our small boat? We decided to get the tail end on first by attaching dock lines and pulling it up the rails of the swim platform inch by inch. We used a gaff handle to gain a few more inches by twisting the rope, tourniquet style. With the rope tied off, we went to work on the head end of the shark, tying the broken off hook of the gaff to another dock line and hooking it into the mouth. We pulled and tugged until finally the body came over the transom and fell with a thud on the engine box.
Since it took our entire supply of ice to cool down the shark and by now it was past noon, we decided to quit tuna fishing and call it a day. As we rounded the tip of Monomoy Island, I called Dan at The Hook-Up and asked him if we could bring the shark in for an official weight. We pulled it up onto his scale and it weighed 267 pounds gutted. Not the species we were targeting that morning, but quite a memorable catch nonetheless. And we have plenty of delicious thresher shark steaks for our families and friends. We’ll take it!
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