A Marine in California who caught a shark and dragged it to shore by hand off the Camp Pendleton coast was surprised to find his catch turned out to be a great white. It was the second time within a few months that someone wrestled a shark to shore.
Marine Jeff Fangman made the catch Oct. 27 while he was with his wife and daughter,
reported San Diego's KGTV on Tuesday.
"Seeing it in the water was just ... it was almost mind blowing," Fangman told the television station.. "It's taken several weeks to get the whole ordeal to sink in."
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The shark's capture and release back into the Pacific Ocean Fangman was caught on video by his wife.
"I don't want it to die," Fangman could be heard saying on the video as he asked his wife to cut the line so he could push it back out into the ocean. Fangman told KGTV that it took about 25 minutes to reel the fish in before realizing it was a great white shark.
"The line just started rolling off the reel," said Fangman, adding that he realized what was on the other line wasn't his normal catch. He said when he lived in the Gulf Coast, he caught other sharks before.
"Bull sharks, tiger sharks, sandbar sharks, lemon sharks," said Fangman. "Lo and behold, it ended up being a great white."
Fangman told the television station he believed the catch was of a young female great white shark.
Back in July, a self-proclaimed shark wrestler wrangled a 200-pound brown shark onto a Nantucket, Mass., and also released it back into the water.
Elliot Sudal, 24, was bluefishing Sunday off the coast of Nantucket but soon realized he wasn’t the only one.
"I could feel a sharp tug on the line and when I pulled the fish up, I noticed that something was biting them in half," Sudal, a boat captain, told the New York Daily News.
It is illegal to hunt great white sharks in several countries, including the United States,
according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Great white sharks are one of top predators of the ocean with an ancestry of more than 400 million years, according to the Smithsonian. Great whites are also known to be long-distance swimmers, able to make swims from the Hawaiian Islands to California and from South Africa to Australia, researchers have found, per the Smithsonian.
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The Smithsonian noted that the great white's torpedo shape allows it to swim up to 35 miles per hour. Great whites can live up to 60 years and females gestates their young for about a year before giving birth from two to 12 babies at a time, per the Smithsonian.
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