I’d say you could call this the catch of a lifetime.
According to ABC News, 12-year-old Campbell Keenan of Massachusetts was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for his sister’s hockey tournament, when him and his family decided to go out on a charter boat to go deep sea fishing, in hopes of catching tuna…
And boy, I’d say this was a million times better.
Keenan felt something massive fighting the line, and after a 45-minute battle, he realized that he had a great white shark on his hands.
Campbell told the outlet:
“We realized it was a shark when it was like 20 feet away, probably, and we had to get it in. We put this, like, buoy on it to make it not go under.”
He said once the shark was reeled in, everybody on the boat was “ecstatic.”
He continued:
“When you pull the rod up, it was like lifting a 50-pound weight. It was so hard to pull up.”
The shark turned out to be a whopping 11-feet long, and weighed between 400 to 700 pounds, according to Keenan’s mother, Colleen Keenan.
She also discussed the catch with the outlet:
“Campbell was doing the reeling and then the first mate was guiding him and telling him how to let the rod go down and then pull it back up and reel as he’s pulling up.
And then I was holding on to Campbell because he wasn’t strapped in anything and the great white could have easily just taken him for a ride.”
Campbell said they didn’t pull the shark into the boat, because there are regulations in the U.S. about taking great whites out of the water. However, they were able to pull it close enough to the boat for the captain to tag it:
“I didn’t get it closer than four feet to it. But the captain got right up there and tagged them.”
The captain of the charter, Capt. Paul Paolucci, said this is the third great white he’s seen caught since 2003.
He said that he made a small puncture hole in the shark and used a six-foot stick to tag it.
Paolucci added:
“It was very exciting for everybody involved. And for everybody else, it was their first great white.”
