Watch a fisherman reel in quite a catch — a shark off Ocean Shores in Washington
Michael Newman and his fiance, Tayler Rose of Bremerton, were camping near Ocean Shores, Washington, last week when they went crabbing and fishing at Westport Marina, hoping to catch some bass or rockfish, Newman told McClatchy News.
It was a quiet day, and Newman wasn’t having any luck at all — just casting his line, reeling it in and recasting, hoping for a bite. But things took quite an exciting turn when he set his pole down to check the crab pot, he said.
He saw Rose run for the pole as it flew into the ocean.
“The pole goes up, over and into the deep ocean and — gone,” Newman said. “That was a crazy moment.”
Newman saw the pole resurface about 20 yards out, he said. He grabbed another pole and started trying to reel the first back in, when he saw what had pulled it into the water.
“I’m yelling at people, ‘That’s my pole in the water, there’s a shark on it,’” he said.
A bystander tried to help reel the pole in with a crab pot caster attached to his fishing pole, Newman said.
“Little did we know, a sand shark was still on the line when we got the pole out,” Rose wrote in a Facebook post.
Rose wrote that the shark got tangled up in crab pots near the shore as it struggled against Newman’s line. Newman got a better look further down the dock and said the shark appeared to be about 6 feet long.
Eventually, the couple was able to retrieve the fishing pole and the shark disappeared, KING 5 News reported.
While the couple believed the shark was a sand shark because of its size and teeth, a spokeswoman for Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium told McClatchy one of its aquarists believes it was something else, based on the video.
“It kind of looks like a Brown Smooth Hound Shark, but it could also be a light colored Spiny Dogfish. It’s hard to be 100% sure,” Marc Duncan, assistant curator of Point Defiance, said in an email.
A brown smooth-hound is a slender shark with large eyes, a long snout and triangular fins, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History. They grow up to 3 feet long, the museum’s website said.
Brown smooth-hounds are commonly found near coasts in the eastern Pacific Ocean at the bottom of bays, according to the museum.
Spiny dogfish have slim bodies with pointed snouts and distinctive white spots, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries said on its website. They can grow more than 4 feet long with sharp spines in front of their two dorsal fins, according to NOAA Fisheries.
They usually live near the U.S. West Coast and British Columbia, NOAA Fisheries says.
Sand sharks, also commonly known as sand tiger sharks, usually grow to be about 6 to 10 feet long and 200 to 350 pounds, according to National Geographic. They’re called “sand sharks” because they’re often found near shorelines on the ocean floor, according to National Geographic.
Usually they stay in warmer waters throughout the world’s oceans, except for the eastern Pacific, National Geographic says.
This story was originally published June 30, 2020 at 6:51 PM with the headline "Watch a fisherman reel in quite a catch — a shark off Ocean Shores in Washington."