700-Pound Mako Shark Caught Off A Fishing Pier In Florida, Takes 60 People To Drag It To Shore

A 700-pound Mako shark was caught off of the Navarre Beach Fishing Pier in the Florida Panhandle, and it took sixty people on the pier to help drag the behemoth catch onto the beach.

Joey Polk, leader of the ‘Team True Blue’ fishing team, was the angler who reeled in this apex predator. Joey’s fishing team is comprised of a handful of cousins, and they specialize in catching really, really, ridiculously big sharks. Just back in April of last year they landed an 805-pound Mako using the same tactics.

So what made this catch in particular so spectacular? Well, look at this freak of nature:

That mako shark is a straight dinosaur and I don’t care if you say otherwise.

Here’s that ‘Oh shit, what do we do?’ moment that was caught on film:

Some more pictures once the 700-pound Mako Shark was dragged up onto the beach:

The NWFDailyNews reports that the ‘Team True Blue’ fishing squad keeps their tactics secret, and while usually they release the sharks they catch this one was kept, because the family ‘wanted shark for dinner‘:

“There’s absolutely a secret to catching this monster fish, and that’s just one I’ll never tell,” said Polk.

“Our team has just come together and perfected what we do,” he added. “We’ve researched our beach, we know our sharks, we’ve charted our waters.”

They tag and release almost all of the sharks that they catch for a research lab based at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

Thursday’s shark was different.

His kids wanted shark for dinner.

And scientist wanted a closer look at a large Mako caught so close to shore.

“This is a big stepping stone for them,” Polk said.

The shark was winched onto a flat bed tow truck on the beach, driven to Milton and stored in a large “fish coffin,” which is a cooler bag packed with ice.

Scientists drove 10 hours overnight to harvest the shark’s backbone, the contents of its stomach and some of the animal’s organs.

The animal, which measured 10 feet, 9 inches, was a female. She wasn’t pregnant and had recently had some small fish for dinner.

“It was just a real fat fish,” he said.

Just a real fat fish, eh? As someone who went to college up in the panhandle I can confirm that the fish up there tend to be a little wider in the girth. Maybe it’s all the riverbeds dumping easy meals into the mouths of these fish, or maybe it’s all the BP Oil pollution leaking into the water…who knows?

[Inquisitr via NWFDailyNews]