Four seasoned shark fishermen started offshore aboard the 39-foot Orca well before daybreak on Sunday. The four buddies were entered in the popular Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo out of Dauphin Island on the Gulf Coast, near the mouth of Mobile Bay.
“We were about a mile offshore Mobile Bay in 30 feet of water, and at 4:30 a.m. we hooked a huge shark,” Tommy Bowyer tells Outdoor Life. “It ate a 3-pound chunk of jack crevalle. I was the angler, and that started a long, two-hour fight.”
For two hours Bowyer battled the hard-pulling shark. Much of the fight happened in the pre-dawn darkness. Bowyer was fishing a Penn International reel spooled with 150-pound test monofilament, a wire-to-cable leader, and a 10/0 circle hook.
Photo courtesy of Tommy Bowyer
“It was a brutal fight,” says the 23-year-old from Foley, Alabama. “I’ve been commercial fishing for sharks since I was 15 years old, and I’ve caught lots of big ones. But this bull is the biggest I’ve caught or seen and was the most fun to catch.
“Finally, at 6:30 a.m., we got a tail rope around the bull. We have hydraulics on the Orca, because it’s a commercial fishing boat. We used it to winch the big shark up and over the transom and into our boat … Thankfully, the shark was dead when we brought him aboard.”
In addition to Bowyer, three other members of the Bon Secour Butchers team were aboard: boat owner David Stiller, Adam Lyons, and Michael Maguire. It was still early in the day when they boated the bull, and they considered fishing longer for tiger sharks. But they realized the shark was exceptionally huge, and likely a Rodeo winner.
So, the anglers decided to return to the weigh station on Dauphin Island. They were back so early in the day that they had to wait for the facility to open. The guessed the shark would weigh around 350 pounds, and were shocked when it officially weighed 494.5 pounds.
Photo courtesy of Tommy Bowyer
“The biologists who weighed my shark said it likely was a state record for bulls,” Bowyer says. “They helped me fill out a record book application for the catch, and it’s in the process of being accepted by the state.”
Alabama’s current state record bull shark weighed 448 pounds 4 ounces, and was caught in June 2015 by Jeff Moore of Birmingham. Bowyer’s nearly 500 pounder bull shark should easily outstrip Moore’s 2015 catch, though it must be officially accepted by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources before it becomes a state record.
Participants in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo are known to catch record-breaking sharks: Last year, a tourney angler caught the state-record tiger shark, which weighed 1,019 pounds and displaced a record that had stood since 1990.
After the shark was weighed and positively identified as a bull, they opened the fish’s belly and found large chunks of a blacktip shark that weighed an estimated 40 pounds. (“That bull was eating pretty well,” says Bowyers.)
Photo courtesy of Tommy Bowyer
Photo courtesy of Tommy Bowyer
In addition to landing the potential state record, the Bon Secour Butchers were awarded a check for $6,000, plus other prizes. Bowyer’s shark was taken by marine biologists for research. Bowyer says he won’t have a reproduction mount made, but he did cut the massive jaws from it.
Biologists serve as Rodeo judges, and they use the sharks caught in the tournament to research species in the Gulf. They’re particularly interested in big sharks, which they say have been relatively rare until recently. Overfishing of sharks in the 1990s prompted tight federal and state limits on shark harvest over the last 30 years. Some scientists now believe harvest limits have allowed sharks to grow large and numerous. Research published in March reported a fivefold increase in baby bull sharks in Alabama’s Mobile Bay.
Many sport anglers and beach goers say shark populations are now much larger than in recent memory, some are pushing for relaxed harvest restrictions to help mitigate public safety perceptions and the loss of fish to hungry sharks.
Still, Mississippi State University professor Marcus Drymon says there are not a lot of huge sharks prowling the coasts. Where they are present, they help keep smaller sharks and stingray numbers in check.
Read Next: Charter Captains Say Sharks Are Out of Control and They’re Losing More Fish to the ‘Taxman’
“There are lots of sharks out there now [and some] big ones, too,” Bowyer says. “There are way more sharks than anyone really knows who doesn’t fish for them or get out on the ocean. It’s by far the biggest shark population we’ve ever seen.”
