Giant Shark: 1300 Pound Mako Caught Off California a Record

Roy Scheider's iconic line from the movie "Jaws" must have come to mind for a group of fisherman who caught a world record 1300 pound shark off Huntington Beach, Calif., on Monday – "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

The fishermen caught the massive shortfin mako shark 15 miles off shore on Monday, according to KTLA. Jason Johnston, of Mesquite, Texas, chartered the boat that made the catch.

The shark was 11 feet long, 8 feet in girth and took more than two hours and a quarter-mile of line to reel in, Johnston said. According to the Los Angeles Times, the world record catch for a mako shark is 1,221 pounds, caught off Chatham, Mass. in 2001.

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Monday's shark weighed at a processing plant in Gardena at 1,323.5 pounds, breaking the old record by a little more than 100 pounds.

The men said the giant shark jumped as high as 20 feet in the air while it was being reeled in. They finally pulled it to the side of the boat, the Breakaway, and tied it up with a steel cable.

“It’s unreal. This thing is definitely a killing machine,” Johnston said. “Any wrong step and I could have went out of the boat and to the bottom of the ocean,” he said.

The six men had motored into the Pacific Ocean for more than a day of fun. They were filming a reality show called "The Professionals" for the Outdoor Channel.

The men posed next to the cobalt blue fish and opened its jaws, revealing its dagger-sharp rows of teeth to the cameras. They recounted how, if anything went wrong, they would have ended up as "lunch" or "at the bottom of the sea."

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Sharks still manage to fire up the imagination of land-bound humans. According to the website Oceana.org, only about a dozen of the approximately 500 shark species are considered potentially dangerous to humans. White, tiger and bull sharks are responsible for more than half of all shark attacks.

Between 2006 and 2010 there have been an average of 4.2 fatal shark attacks worldwide. Over the same time, there were a total of 179 shark attacks in the U.S., resulting in three fatalities.

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