2000 lb Shark Caught in Sea of Cortez

On Sunday April 15^th, two commercial fishermen Guadalupe y Baltazar, motored out in their panga with its 75 hp outboard motor, from the Sonoran region, on the mainland side of the Sea of Cortez, known as El Choyudo to check their nets that they had set the night before. Little did they know that they were in for the surprise of their lives.  As they began to haul their net in, it seemed much heavier than usual – more than their usual catch of smaller scale fish. “We were amazed and immediately realized that we had a huge, dead, great white shark and  then we thought what are we going to do?” said Guadalupe. They were in a dilemma; how to get it back to shore? Though they were less than two miles from the beach, there was no way they could possibly get this monster into their 22 ft skiff. They thought about it for a few minutes then decided to tow it to shore and radioed for help. It took an hour to make it back to the beach where it took fifty people to drag it up onto the sand. The shark was measured and was just shy of twenty feet long and a record catch for this area, with it weighing one ton or 2000 lbs. Guadalupe y Baltazar swore they had never seen a fish this big before in their lives, even though on March 13^th of this year, some of their fellow fishermen had also caught a great white, which had weighed 450 kg or 990 lbs. They added “we have seen a lot of sharks, in fact this is an area known for sharks, but we have never seen anything like his”. Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency (Profepa) are investigating as this is a protected species and they thought is strange that a fish like this would be so close to shore