Pisces ask our friends and customers to catch and release sharks...

Sharks continue to make a comeback and once again this week we had a couple of threshers, a hammerhead and a mako. We heard of a big 180 lb thresher caught aboard "Retriever", the fish was extremely strong, probably because it was hooked with a circle hook and wasn't feeling much pain. Once boated it was found to be a pregnant female with almost fully developed embryos, two were almost full formed and were taken out of their sacs and began swimming around in the bait tank and were then put into the sea, hopefully to survive.

Sharks are now an endangered specie, we would like to ask our customers and friends to catch and release sharks, just like you do with marlin.

Thank you and best wishes,

Tracy

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Caught aboard 61 ft Viking “Retriever” by Martha Walmurut on January 11th

This is about a 180lbs thresher shark which we caught today. We had a live mackerel down deep and the bite was pretty weird, not exactly like a marlin, but that is what was in the area. I never give up a fight, but, after an hour, and a broken back- 40# line, I gave it to Larry. It took another hour: and all three of us, me, Larry, and Omar, fought it before we finally got it up. My back is now officially broken! just kidding.

I am copying this to Tracy because i think this is probably what we had on last week that we broke off after 2 hours or so.

A couple of interesting things:

Look at the hook in the corner of the mouth on the right side. It is a rather small 8/0 circle hook, then look at the mouth and the teeth. Hard to believe that the line did not break - although, the rod did and we had to tie onto another rod to finish the fight. this is a testament that circle hooks do not hurt fish...

Second, look at the size of the tail. it was 52", more than half the size of the body.

Finally, the most interest thing was that when we cut it open, there were a number of almost fully formed babies inside. We kept two. They had the same long tail, teeth were formed, but look at the size of the eyes..

When we took them out of the umbilical sack, they appeared to be dead, but after pictures, we put them in the bait tank and they started swimming around and we finally released them in hopes they will live. Also, there were 3 or 4 more sacs with less developed embryos in the shark.

We never know what wonders we are about to encounter when we leave the dock each morning.
See ya
Marna