Largest Great White Shark Ever Caught

Fischer is a Shark Man...no not Greg, the other one [Louisville Magazine]

It’s the summer of 1975. You’re sitting in a dark movie theater too scared to eat your popcorn. On the screen, a sun-beaten fisherman with bad teeth, leathery skin and a three-day growth of beard is describing the monster you haven’t seen yet.

“Bad fish,” the ever-imitable Quint says famously. “Not like going down the pond chasin’ bluegills and tommycods. This shark, swallow you whole.”

Bah-dum . . .

Blame Jaws for at least one generation’s shark-phobia. The Great White that swallowed Quint is up there with Frankenstein and Dracula on the movie monster Mount Rushmore. And Jaws begat a litter of pups. A Google search for “shark movies” nets 136,000 hits. These days, there’s even a show devoted to egging on Great Whites to leap from the water like trained dolphins. Air Jaws! Tonight on Discovery!

Comes now into the water Shark Men, currently in its second season on the National Geographic Channel. At first glance in the TV listings, Shark Men may look like another version of Quint vs. Bad Fish. But if you’ve seen Shark Men, you know it’s a different breed. The idea behind the show is to study Great Whites by tagging them with electronic tracking devices to learn about their little-known life cycles — the better to protect the species.

“We’ve caught the 15 biggest fish of all time,” says Chris Fischer, 46, the Louisville native and Shark Men expedition leader. “No one has ever been able to capture, handle and release Great Whites alive because they’re too big. But we’ve managed to catch them, give scientists 15 minutes with them, and let them go.”

You may have heard of Chris’ big brother Greg — you know, the mayor. “I tell people that we flipped a coin and he lost,” Greg says. “I got to run for mayor and he had to go catch sharks.”

So how did a boy from landlocked Louisville wind up tagging sharks on the high seas for some 300 million TV viewers worldwide? The Trinity High graduate points to a childhood fishing Kentucky’s ponds and streams. When the family business took him to Southern California, he fished the ocean — and fell in love.

He started Fischer Productions, which led to Offshore Adventures on ESPN, which led to Shark Men. “Sharks are the great moderators of the ocean,” Fischer says of the near-endangered species. “They keep everything in balance.

9 Biggest Sharks Ever Caught | Total Pro Sports

Sadly, Shark Week 2011 is drawing to a close. Now, the good news is that we won’t have to see any more of those dumb commercials with Andy Samberg. (Hey, I love the guy, but the commercials are not funny). The bad news? Obviously, no more sharks. Thankfully, I’ve come up with the perfect remedy for post-shark week tristesse, an electronic panacea to help us bide the time until Shark Week 2012 . It’s a list of some of the biggest sharks ever caught. Yep, I’ve scoured the internet to find 9 of the greatest trophies ever captured in the world of extreme sport fishing. All you have to do it bookmark this page, then, whenever you feel that emptiness in your soul that only awesome sharks can fill, click on the link and have another look.

The official International Game Fish Association (IGFA) record for a bull shark ( Carcharhinus leucas ) is a 697 lb 12 oz fish caught off Kenya in 2001 by an angler named Ronald de Jager. However, the bull shark pictured here could very well have beaten that record. It was caught by Ed Maloney, who was just fishing off the seawall behind his cousin Frank Maloney’s home in St. Petersburg, FL. The two Maloney’s couldn’t land the fish themselves, so they had to call Frank’s next door neighbor for help. Together, the three of them landed the 8 ft 10 in 700 pounder. Since they didn’t have a certified scale, there was no way of verifying the weight, and thus no way of obtaining official world-record status.

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Clyde “Bucky” Dennis of Port Charlotte, FL, was trying to catch a world record shark when he set out to fish waters famous for large quantities of tarpon. Incredibly, he actually did it. Using a live 20 lb stingray as bait, Dennis hooked his 14 ft hammerhead ( Sphyrna mokarran ) at about 11:30 a.m., then called a few of his buddies so they could motor on out and give him a hand. After a long battle in which their boat was dragged 12 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico by the fish, Dennis and company were finally able to where it out and haul it in. This catch beat the old record by 289 pounds.

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The sixgilled shark, more commonly known as the cow shark and less commonly known as Hexanchus griseus , belongs to the Hexanchiformes order of sharks. These are the oldest, most primitave sharks in the world, and they have more relatives in the fossil record than they do swimming the oceans of the world. Their most notable feature is, of course, their extra gill—modern shark species have 5, but these ancients sharks have 6. The IGFA world record for a sixgilled shark is a massive 1,298 pounds.

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