Hourslong fight with a 500-pound bull shark may end up setting record in Alabama

A group of Alabama anglers didn’t understand just how massive the bull shark in their boat was until a crane lifted it up and a scale weighed it at nearly 500 pounds.

If certified as expected, it’ll shatter the previous record by more than 40 pounds.

During the July 19-21 Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, Tommy Bowyer hooked the first-place 494.5-pound bull shark, according to the rodeo’s leaderboard.

The anglers with the Bon Secour Butchers fishing club had battled 6-foot waves the day before the July 21 big catch and had to head in early, co-captain Adam Lyons told McClatchy News in a phone interview July 23.

The next morning, the seas had calmed a little, and the anglers set out looking for tiger sharks and bull sharks, Lyons said. Then Bowyer hooked a big one.

“All of a sudden it just went bam,” Lyons said. “It took. He jumped on this thing, he straddled the rod. We worked on the drag setting more than anything. We let the equipment and boat do the work.”

But the shark fought for more than two hours.

“It was a while,” Bowyer, who also goes by “Tuna,” told AL.com. “It would get to the boat and take off again, get to the boat, take off again.”

Lyons said that Bowyer, a commercial fisherman and the first mate that day, was “exhausted” after a couple hours. But he continued to fight and eventually got the shark close enough that Lyons could tie a rope around the tail.

“We didn’t fully understand the magnitude of the shark until we saw it,” he said.

But even then, they didn’t think it was big enough to beat the 2015 record of 448 pounds.

“I thought about 350,” Bowyer told AL.com. “Not 494.”

The anglers brought it to the weighing station, where their fish earned not only first place in the tournament but would easily beat the previous state record.

“We did not expect the scale to say 494-and-a-half,” Lyons said.

Once the fish was weighed, marine biologists used the carcass for research, dissecting the fish and testing it for microplastics, Lyons said.

The anglers thought about setting out again for a tiger shark, but after the rough seas the day before and a big victory in hand, Lyons said they decided to call it.

The tournament took place on Dauphin Island in the Gulf of Mexico.

This story was originally published July 23, 2024 at 6:35 PM with the headline "Hourslong fight with a 500-pound bull shark may end up setting record in Alabama."