805-pound shark catch may set record

Florida fishermen wanted to keep catch secret

MILTON, Fla. – Eleven-feet long, 805 pounds and it almost swam under the radar.

A group of Florida fishermen caught a potentially record-setting mako shark along the Gulf Coast on Tuesday.

Joey Polk and his cousins recorded the fight with the shark and took pictures after reeling in the 805-pound beast.

"It's unbelievable," Polk told WKRG-TV. "There are people in their lifetime that will never know that type of excitement."

However, Polk and his cousins didn't want word of the huge catch to get out. Polk says he feared people would try to ban land-based shark fishing. He also didn't want to scare off any tourists.

"We just want to save our sport," Polk told WKRG-TV. "The more people that know about it, the more people that crowd our beach, with hundreds of people swimming -- that's not what we want."

News of the giant shark started to spread when someone snapped a photograph of the shark in the back of Polk's pickup truck at a gas station. The photograph was posted to Facebook, where it went viral.


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