Hammerhead Shark Fishing

What an awesome weekend of shark fishing we're having in Fort Lauderdale. Monster hammerheads and big Dusky sharks are biting excellent in 350ft of water off of Fort Lauderdale. Yesterday's trip, we had Erik out fishing. Erik is a repeat customer of ours who comes down from Canada every year and does a few charters with us. On yesterday's charter, the fishing was slow, so we decided to go out to 350-400ft of water and go deep dropping for tilefish. There was no current at all, so we could just sit on top of the spot and drop down without moving. The perfect conditions for deep dropping. Shark fishing lately has been good, so in addition to our tilefish drop rods, we also put down a couple big shark baits on the bottom and we floated one out on top. The tilefish rods were going off. Every drop, we caught 1 or 2 tilefish. A half hour of catching tilefish later, the deep shark bait gets hit and starts peeling off drag. Fish on!! and it was a big one. Not many fish can pull drag off of a 130 Penn International, especially with such force. Erik started off the fight. Erik is in a wheelchair and has engineered a fighting gimble to fight the fish from, and a steel rod with shoulder straps to keep his back erect during the fight. From his wheelchair, he fought the monster fish on the 130 International for over 20 minutes, at which time his sons both tag teamed the fish until we caught him. It took all 3 anglers to catch this sea monster. It was a monster hammerhead shark, an 8+ footer and almost 250 pounds. We pullled the shark into the boat for a quick photo and then we released him. Erik has been fishing with me a couple trips a year for a few years now. So far he's caught multiple sailfish, wahoo, tuna, dolphin, kingfish, amberjacks, groupers and more... but this was his first shark ever and his biggest fish of all-time. Great fish Erik, Tim and Edward. Oh yeah, we also caught about 20 tilefish while we were deep dropping and a 15 pound kingfish trolling on the way in.