Anglers battle huge fish on Florida beach — and reel in 1,200-pound surprise, video shows
For many, catching a massive shark is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
For Blaine Kenny, it’s his day job.
Kenny is the owner of Coastal Worldwide, a shark fishing outfitter and fishing tour group out of Pensacola, Florida.
Most of the time Kenny and his partner, Dylan Wier, create the perfect environment for guests to fish for a range of finned predators, but on Jan. 31, Kenny was the one behind the reel.
Kenny and Wier were out on Navarre Beach, a stretch of sand on Santa Rosa Island between Destin and Pensacola.
On Kenny’s hook was the “biggest bait possible,” Wier said in a video posted to the duo’s YouTube channel, the head of an 80-pound “massive yellowfin tuna.”
The duo had set up shop on the beach with their two reels the night before and sat on the beach as the stars passed and the sun began to rise, they said in the video.
At 8 a.m., there was a tug on Kenny’s line, and then the spool started running, the video shows.
The duo started the “fight clock,” and Kenny started to reel in whatever was on the line from the beach.
But it wasn’t easy, and whatever was in the water was big.
“This is absolutely nuts dude, he’s screaming east,” Kenny said. “We might have to end up chasing him at some point.”
The fight went on for nearly an hour, Kenny tiring as he would make progress in drawing the fish in only for it to pull back out again.
“It’s a big, big wintertime shark,” Wier said. “There’s only a few things it can be, a mako, a giant tiger, a white shark or the biggest dusky we’ve ever seen in our lives.”
Using a drone, Wier scoured the shoreline to see if he could get a bird’s-eye view of whatever was on the line — and then he saw it.
“Look at that, that’s a white shark!” Wier says. “That’s a monster, dude, that’s not just any white shark.”
“Oh my gosh, bro,” Kenny says as he keeps up the fight.
The great white shark was pulled close to shore, and Wier says because of its size and species, they needed to bring it in and get it back out as fast as possible.
As the shark closes in, Wier runs out into the water with tools to take out the hook quickly.
“This has been the day that Blaine has been dreaming about since he dropped his first bait,” Wier said.
The shark was at least 12 feet long, the duo said, and likely weighed at least 1,200 pounds.
Just a few minutes later,the hook was removed from the shark, and it was released to swim back out to sea.
This isn’t the first time Coastal Worldwide made headlines with a massive shark catch.
In March, the duo caught an 11-foot great white shark off the coast of Orange Beach, Alabama, McClatchy News reported.
“This is a very rare event and maybe, if those guys continue to fish from the beach for the next several years and never catch another one like it,” Marcus Drymon from Mississippi State University told WALA in March.
Ten months later, the duo did it again — and bigger.
“The size was unreal, for sure,” the company said in a comment on its Facebook post.
Navarre Beach is about 170 west of Tallahassee.
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