This is my post for #freewriters 2598 prompt experiment on me hosted by @mariannewest
When one of our daughters was in her teens, her boyfriend wanted to catch a shark. She had been telling him about us talking about how many fish they took from us. He asked my husband to take him.
We use pigfish for bait, they grunt, and one thing a shark can not resist or any other fish, is when you put two pigfish on one hook. My husband rigged a rod for catching a shark, with a wire leader, (we were happy when they broke our line). He caught bait and they headed for an area we could not fish in because there were too many bull sharks.
Terrance cast his line and BAM, one hit and the race was on, line went to peeling off the rod and it was getting low on the spool. My husband got the anchor up and the motor started when only a few wraps were left. They chased the shark and Terrance cranked the reel as hard as he could. After struggling to get it in the boat, my husband stuck it in the neck area cutting its spine and cut its tail off to bleed it. They brought it to the fish house where our daughter was waiting, she had given strict orders for them to not gut it on the river.
They both used box hooks to lift it onto the dock and it was like they hung a huge sign over it that read, experiment on me. Our daughter has always wanted to be a nurse and now she is a nurse. When they cut it open, she grabbed the guts and started going through them identifying the different parts and seeing what it had eaten, she was fascinated with it and us with her.
They skinned it, packaged the meat, and weighed it, if I remember right it was almost 80 pounds of meat, they gave us some and said they had others that would take some so none of the shark meat went to waste.
To me, shark meat tastes just like the fish we used to get when there was a Long John Silver's restaurant. It is a white fluffy meat, not dense like you think it would be.
photos are mine but not from that day