Footage shows anglers posing with a partially consumed swordfish as the still-hungry mako shark circles the boat.
Anglers out of San Diego boated a large swordfish recently, but not before an equally large mako shark claimed part of the catch.
“The taxman took his share, but Pacifica Sportfishing managed most of a swordfish on the first day of their trip,” Seaforth Landing explained via Instagram.
The image shows five anglers posing with a swordfish whose lower body had been shredded by the shark as the swordfish was being reeled to the boat.
A swipe-through features video footage showing the mako shark swimming near the boat as one passenger remarks, “He’s wondering where his meal went.”
Swordfish catches by recreational anglers are rare off Southern California, but it’s not rare for sharks to go after any large fish that’s struggling at the end of a fishing line.
Sharks that claim part or all of a hooked game fish are commonly referred to as tax collectors or, singularly, the taxman.
Anglers aboard a San Diego sportfishing boat watched in awe as a mako shark attacked a hooked bluefin tuna as it was being gaffed.
Anglers aboard a San Diego sportfishing boat watched in awe this week as a mako shark attacked a hooked bluefin tuna as it was being gaffed.
The tuna had been reeled to the Tribute’s rail and the captain and a crewman had gaffed and were about to haul the fish aboard when the shark chomped onto its tail end.
“Get some!” the videographer says in the accompanying footage, while passengers cheer.
The fish was ultimately hauled aboard, but minus a small portion.
“The tax man!” exclaimed one follower beneath Tribute Sportfishing’s Instagram post.
(Sharks that go attack hooked fish are jokingly referred to as tax collectors.)
A few suggested that the crew should have attempted to gaff the shark, while others merely expressed appreciation for the rare footage.
The Instagram description reads: “Some people try and kill these things! We embrace how awesome they are. 700-pound-plus Mako getting just a little sample.”
Chad Patti, spearfishing with two friends, was waiting for the boat to pick him up when a mako shark blindsided him from the rear.
Chad Patti, spearfishing with two friends in the Gulf of Mexico, was waiting for the boat to pick him up when a mako shark blindsided him from the rear.
The shark tore the fin off his right foot and swam away, as video footage he captured of the encounter shows. ViralHog posted his video Sunday, though it occurred in January.
“Luckily, he only took my fin and not my life,” Patti wrote on social media soon after the incident. “I’m very fortunate.”
Patti told WKRG soon after the incident that the first scream in the video was “the terror of I don’t know what’s going on exactly.” He added, “The first thing that went through my mind is I don’t have a leg. I felt a lot of pressure on my right leg from where I think her pec fin hit my leg…It was intense.”
Josh Loucks and Nathan Lancaster were on the boat about 30 feet away.
“There was a huge sense of relief once we were all back in the boat with our arms and legs,” Loucks, who had jumped in to assist Patti, told WKRG.
Patti told ViralHog, “It hit me from behind at a good angle from my right rear. I would’ve never seen her coming even if I was looking down. When she hit me I did a flip, she knocked the speargun out of my hands, and partially flooded my mask.”
The heart-racing encounter did not deter the divers from going back into the water, however. But they did admit they dive closer together and keep a closer eye on one another.
Can you locate the mako shark in a photo quiz issued by Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans?
Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans on Wednesday tweeted a quiz asking viewers if they can guess which of the four sharks in the accompanying image is a mako shark.
We’ll take it a step farther and ask viewers to identify all four sharks in the photo. (Answer provided below.)
Fisheries and Oceans included a link that contains information about the shortfin mako shark and explains that the species is classified as endangered in Canada.
Mako sharks are found globally in tropical and temperate waters, but in the North Atlantic the species is considered to be comprised of a single population.
The sleek and powerful predators and can attain bursts of 40-plus mph while attacking prey such as tuna or swordfish.
Mako sharks can measure 12 feet and weigh more than 1,000 pounds. (The world record catch, set off Massachusetts in 2001, stands at 1,221 pounds.)
In the comments section of the Fisheries and Oceans tweet, several followers provided the correct answer, and a few identified all four species.
The types of sharks, in order: A) White shark, B) Thresher shark, C) Hammerhead shark, and D) Mako shark.
A fisherman was battling a mako shark when it turned direction and leaped into the bow of the boat. Video captures the thud and part of the chaos.
A fisherman was battling an estimated 330-pound mako shark when it suddenly turned direction and leaped into the bow of the boat, landing with a loud thud.
The incident occurred Saturday off the coast of Whitianga on the north island of New Zealand on a boat from Churchys Charters NZ with five fishermen aboard. They were targeting kingfish, but a big mako decided to crash the party.
“We were fighting it normally and it was jumping around. I told the customers ‘If it jumps in the boat get out of the way,’” skipper Ryan Churches told the Herald.
“It just so happened that about 30 seconds later it jumped on the top of the boat. It was crazy. We were all watching the rod, and the line was going out to the side of the boat and it changed direction suddenly… it just happened to jump at the same time and we got a [heck] of a fright.”
The video doesn’t show the leaping mako, but you can hear it “crash-landing” and see it thrashing about in the bow. Churchys Charters NZ Facebook page posted the video.
It was the first time Churches has witnessed a shark jumping into a boat, though it’s been documented with makos plenty of times.
“We were lucky it was on the front of the boat and we had windscreens and hard tops blocking it,” Churches told the Herald. “We were lucky it didn’t come into the back of the boat otherwise it could have a wildly different story.”
“There’s nothing much we could do,” Churches said. “We can’t go up the front to go near it because they go absolutely bonkers.”
Instead, the 9-foot mako thrashed around for about two minutes before wriggling under the bow rail and sliding off the side of the boat. It was free from the boat and the hook.
“The customers reacted better than what a lot of people would have,” Churches told the Herald. “The cameras were out, but they probably didn’t realize the danger we could have been in.”
A prominent Southern California shark tagger has documented his tug of war with a ferocious mako shark, he said, to showcase the species’ “beauty, power, and strength.”
A prominent Southern California shark tagger has documented his tug of war with a ferocious mako shark, he said, to showcase the species’ “beauty, power, and strength.”
“I’m their ambassador,” Poe told FTW Outdoors.
The accompanying footage shows the 12-foot shark refusing to release a bonito tied to a rope and fighting for possession with head shakes, much in the way a dog might refuse to let go of a stuffed toy.
(There was no hook in the bait; the shark could have let go at any time.)
The footage opens with Poe tapping the shark’s head, as if to signal the start of a competition, as the shark surfaces with the bonito inches from his boat.
The competition ends after about a minute, when the shark releases the bonito and Poe declares, “That’s right, it’s my fish baby! Come back again when you want to play!”
Poe tags white sharks and mako sharks for the Marine Conservation Science Institute. He typically keeps hookless baits in the water to let him know when sharks arrive in the chum slick.
“When I want to tag a white shark or a mako shark, I use a hook and a hand line,” Poe explained.
The MCSI team, including Poe, are featured in the National Geographic documentary “Counting Jaws,” which examines a newly discovered great white shark aggregation site off California.
Poe also will appear in several episodes of the Discovery series, “Shark Week,” which begins July 24.
A Southern California fisherman who tags sharks for research recorded what he described as a “monster mako splashdown” late Sunday near Santa Catalina Island.
A Southern California angler who tags sharks for research recorded what he described as a “monster mako splashdown” late Sunday near Santa Catalina Island.
Interestingly, the adult female mako shark took a live mackerel tied to a fishing line and jumped seven times against the drag of heavy tackle despite not being hooked.
The accompanying footage, captured by Keith Poe, shows four of the seven jumps.
A second video shows mako sharks taking Poe’s hookless baits and leaping in the dark to rock music.
Poe, who tags sharks for the Marine Conservation Science Institute, told FTW Outdoors that he keeps hookless baits in the water to alert him when sharks arrive in the chum slick.
“When I want to tag a white shark or a mako shark, I use a hook and a handline,” Poe said.
Keith Poe, who has tagged more than 5,000 sharks off California over the years, posted a video Sunday showing him hand feeding an 11-foot mako shark as though it were a pet.
Keith Poe, who has tagged more than 5,000 sharks off California, posted a video Sunday showing him hand feeding an 11-foot mako shark as though it were a pet.
Poe’s vast experience should be enough of a notice to novice fishermen that this is not something they should consider trying the next time they venture onto the ocean.
In the Facebook footage, accompanied by “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by the late Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, the shark makes repeated passes behind and alongside Poe’s boat.
Poe on Tuesday uploaded the same video to YouTube, without music. That footage can be viewed below.
The shark, always surfacing off the stern and rising to the tuna carcass held over the port rail, seems careful to bite only the carcass instead of the hand that holds the bait.
So why does Poe, who encountered this mako shark 47 miles west of Marina del Rey, practice this routine before he begins the tagging process?
“This was the result of my hand feeding her for hours, calming her down and getting to know each other for the capture and tagging that was come,” Poe told FTW Outdoors. “I am trying to minimize the capture shock.
“For me, it’s all about being minimally invasive and I take it very seriously.”
Poe explained that mako sharks, the fastest sharks on earth, swim swiftly and warily when they appear in his chum slick.
“When they first come to the boat they’re very aggressive because they have to kill to survive,” Poe said. “They’re usually too smart to take a large hook until I build their trust, and they don’t freak out nearly as bad once I hook them.”
Poe, who uses hand-line gear and heavy line, said this mako, which measured 10 feet, 9 inches, was hand fed for nearly four hours.
After Poe finally hooked the shark, he had it tagged and released in only 30 minutes – a remarkably brief period considering the immense power a shark of this size possesses.
Poe probably wasn’t always so painstakingly considerate. He once tagged 54 mako sharks in a single night in outer Santa Monica Bay.
But mako sharks do seem to appreciate the hand feeding. Poe cited a 12-foot shark he tagged off Santa Catalina Island in 2019. “She came back and ate out of my hand, after I tagged and released her, for another 30 minutes,” he said.
That shark, named Cinderella, is among the dozens of mako and great white sharks Poe has tagged for the Marine Conservation Science Institute.
Beachgoers north of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, recently found a freshly killed mako shark with what they believe was a stingray barb protruding from its head.
Beachgoers north of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, recently found a freshly killed mako shark with what they believed was a stingray barb protruding from its head.
“A shark that washed out on the beach in San Jose del Cabo. Apparently because it lost a battle with a stingray,” Arturo Chacon, owner of Tag Cabo Sportfishing, wrote on Instagram.
His post has been widely shared and the images have been “borrowed” by other social media users, spreading the stingray theory.
But did a stingray really kill the mako shark? Or was the culprit, perhaps, a much swifter billfish?
https://www.instagram.com/p/CLrp_3hLru9/
For The Win Outdoors shared the post with Chris Lowe, who runs the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach in Southern California. Lowe was skeptical as to whether it was a stingray barb, citing its thickness, but added that he could not tell for sure without seeing more than what appeared in Chacon’s image.
“My alternate guess is a marlin or sailfish bill, but hard to tell without seeing the whole thing,” Lowe said. “Either way, it must have incapacitated the shark enough for it to strand on the beach. Dead sharks sink, so it might have disoriented the shark. Based on the angle of attack, the object likely didn’t pierce the shark’s brain.”
Tracy Ehrenberg, whose family runs Pisces Sportfishing in Cabo San Lucas, agreed with Lowe.
“First thought would be stingray, but shark skin is extremely tough especially in that area and I do not believe a stingray could penetrate the skin, so my guess would be a sailfish,” she said. “Fastest fish in the ocean, swam at the shark at speed, impaled [the shark] and and broke its bill off.”
On the Tag Cabo Sportfishing Instagram post, the Living Sharks Museum in Rhode Island reached out to Chacon, asking if he had more images because “there is some debate regarding details going on in the scientific community about this that could be put to rest with more evidence.”
Chacon told For The Outdoors that he did not possess any other images.
He said he was walking on the beach when he and others discovered the shark Feb. 18. “It looked like it was fresh or lost its life not long ago,” Chacon said. “I cannot tell you for sure what it was, so I just assumed it was from a big stingray.”
Chacon added that another local, who was on the beach with a truck, collected the the shark and drove off. “He said he was going to eat it,” Chacon said.
A fisherman in Australia captured video footage recently showing a mako shark leaping multiple times and almost landing on top of an angler in a nearby boat.
A fisherman in Australia captured video footage recently showing a mako shark leaping multiple times and almost landing on top of an angler in a nearby boat.
The close call was captured by Ryan Cowley off the Queensland town of Yeppoon, and featured Wednesday by 7 News Australia.
The silent footage, showing leaps of perhaps 20 feet, reveals the remarkable athleticism possessed by mako sharks, which are the world’s fastest sharks and can reach top speeds of nearly 50 mph.
Few details are in the 7 News report, and Cowley did not respond to an inquiry by For The Win Outdoors. It remains unclear whether the shark was hooked by someone on his boat, but a person with a rod and reel pointed in the shark’s direction can be seen at the beginning and end of the video.
Mako sharks will sometimes jump in this manner in an attempt to shake fishing hooks, but they’ve also been spotted free jumping for reasons that remain unclear.
In any case, it was fortunate for the shark and angler in the small boat that no contact was made.
