I made the drive all the way over to the Tampa Bay to try and catch some trout, reds, macks, whatever was biting. I brought a buddy from work that had never been paddle fishing before. We had a great morning, limiting out on 18"-20" trout in an hour, and catching a bunch of macks and lady fish. The day was still young and aI got an idea. The last time I was fishing Tampa Bay I tried to catch some sharks and got nothing but some chewed up cable. I couldn't let the sharks beat me, I wanted another try. I didn't have a rod that was really up to catching a large shark, but I did have a spinning rod with lots of 40 lb PowerPro and I could make it work. So off I went in search of a school of large mullet, I found them and snagged one. I then found a nice sand bar to set-up on and deployed a bait on 9 feet of cable. It took all of 5 minutes to get hit. The shark took me all the way to the spool (I had over 500 yds of line on this reel) before I could turn him. A one hour fight then ensued.
The tide had not gone out as much as I had anticipated, so when I got the shark to the sandbar he could still swim, and easily. The shark kept on charging us and then running out again, this could have gone on all day. I had to turn control of the rod over to my friend so I could try and get control of the shark.
Every time I grabbed his tail he would shake me off. So I made a lasso out of my anchor rope, the next time I grabbed his tail I put the lasso over his tail and it worked. I the maneuvered the shark over to the kayak and gave my buddy the tail so he could pull while I lifted the shark into the boat.
The shark measured to ~7ft. Not bad for the tackle that I brought. Now it was time to paddle back to the truck for some shark steaks.
And they were good, I cooked up a bunch of fried chunk and steaks and brought it to work where everybody ravaged it, there were no leftovers.
