We're gonna need a bigger boat...

So a guy on our boat (from Denver, coincidentally) caught a salmon shark quite on accident while we were in our first halibut spot. we knew he had something big on, and it took him 20 minutes or so to reel it in. It kept fighting, going deep, running, going under the boat, etc. Pretty amazing since it was about 365lbs and we were looking for fish 1/5th that size (or smaller)!

They had to kill it before bringing it on board; as you can imagine it's a pretty bad idea to haul a 6ft shark onto a ship of 16 people while it's still alive. Harpoon to the gills and a bat to head seemed to do the trick, and it was hauled on board by the deckhands. However once on board, and with the deckhand standing over it at the gills (which was smart of him to be behind his mouth), he started having pretty serious death spasms and thrashing around. The deckhand squeezed the shark and held on until he could get the bat back in his hand and well....remember the end of GoodFellas where Joe Pesci meets his end in the corn field? Well it was sort of like that.

In any event it was pretty amazing to see it that close. And when we got back into port it was quite the attraction. View all the pictures here