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Fishermen Kerry Grant and William McIntosh swear their ‘one that got away’ story is true, they are not exaggerating, and they are telling it because they think people should know about a humongous great white shark near A beacon.
“We wanted to report it because a fish that size should not be in this place, let alone a great white,” says Kerry.
They were fishing about 1.5km west of A beacon from a 16ft Ally Craft on Tuesday afternoon.
A beacon. Image: Google Earth.
The pair had been out about 11 hours and had been plagued all day by bronze whalers taking bait and catches.
Kerry decided to try out a new rod and reel and threw out bonito tail on 24kg mono.
He lip hooked a 5-6ft bronze whaler shark and decided to play it.
They anchored and he played the fish for about 20 minutes.
The shark did its last dive beneath the boat and Kerry was hauling up what he thought was the dead weight of an exhausted fish.
“All of a sudden it just took off,” says Kerry.
“The reel was screaming. Then it really took off like it was hooked onto a train or something.
“Within 30 seconds of it starting to take off – what we saw next, I swear what I’m telling you is true, and there is no exaggeration at all.
“A great white came out of the water and took the whole bloody thing. Came right out of the water, completely out of the water, did the great white flip-thing that they do with seals.
“It was f**king huge. We never saw the length of it because of the angle it jumped on, but without a word of a lie, we saw the big white stomach and the black back and the shape.
“Very short and very fat, and the typical white pointer tale.
“It’s stomach was about the width of the boot of my car.
“That’s an under exaggeration, I’m trying to be realistic here, but you would have trouble getting it through a sliding door mate. It was the size of a car; it really was it was that fat.
“And the splash was like a container being dropped from a helicopter.
“It just took the six foot shark like it was a kahawai. It just ate it, straight down to its guts. I didn’t believe it.”
He cut his line.
“He hadn’t bitten through the trace and for about five seconds it ran with the line,” says Kerry.
“It was like being hooked to a bus doing 70km/h, you know.”
The action took place about 15 metres from the boat, says Kerry.
“I’ve been fishing a long time and I have never seen anything like that.”
There was a great white seen in the entrance last year says Kerry, but if it’s the same one then it has grown a bit.
“Or it could be full of Rena tucker,” says Kerry.
“That’s the other thought we had. It could be because of the big burley bomb.
“I do a lot of surfing too, and it’s put the willies up me.
“It was just really impressive, you would even consider trying to catch something like that.”
Posted on 25-02-2012 12:04 | By Surfwatch
I was out surfing on Sat 25 Feb at about 9.30. There was a boat putting out cray pots just past the surf line all along Omanu beach. Now just how safe are swimmers, surfers, kids etc, from a shark encounter when there are these irresponsible people putting dead fish all along the beach. Must be a law against this. Questions are only asked after a tragedy occurs.