Expecting Small Mako, Angler Hooks 740-Pounder

Barry Andersen had planned on passing the rod to his 8-year-old son Chase and letting him fight his first mako shark.

But then he saw what he had at the end of the line. It was no ordinary mako.

“I set the hook and that first jump. . . . He came 15 feet out of the water,” Andersen said. “I’ve been shark fishing all my life and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Not many have.

Most makos caught by anglers these days are 50- to 100-pound juveniles. Andersen, 41, a Redondo Beach construction contractor, had hooked into a 740-pounder using live mackerel as bait. It went airborne 11 times, he said, during the 2 1/2-hour struggle late Saturday afternoon in the San Pedro Channel, 17 miles off the Southland coast.

When he finally got the fish alongside his 34-foot boat, he realized how big it was--and decided not to take any chances. “I shot it six times with a .357 Magnum, and it was still full of life. So I reloaded and shot it six more times,” he said.

He and his companions--Dan Teder and Scott Meyers of Dana Point--proceeded to tail-rope the shark and set a course for home, pulling into King Harbor in Redondo Beach at dusk.

The mako was put on ice Saturday night at Captain Kidd’s waterfront fish market-restaurant and placed on display Sunday, stretched out on a large wooden plank. It was measured at 11 feet, with a girth of about four feet and a mouth sporting row after row of ivory-white, dagger-like teeth.

Today, it will be cut into steaks and fillets.

“Yipes! That’s a big mako,” said Tom Neal, science director for the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation in Santa Cruz, when informed of the catch.

“Mako sharks that big used to be common; we’ve got pictures of guys with 1,000-pounders taken back in the ‘50s. But today that’s a very rare catch [because of over-fishing]. We haven’t had any reports of anything over 300 pounds so far this year.”

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Neal added that makos, despite their size and aggressive nature--they fight and jump like marlin when hooked--pose little if any danger to swimmers on local beaches because they typically remain well offshore and feed almost exclusively on open ocean fish.

Perhaps, but not everybody seemed convinced Sunday at Captain Kidd’s, where crowds came to see the shark, its fierce mouth propped open by a hammer.

“It’s pretty, like . . . Jaws-looking,” one woman remarked, keeping her distance.

“I didn’t know these things are out there,” the woman standing next to her said.

Children seemed to be the bravest, touching the teeth and feeling the skin. One wide-eyed little boy, standing face to face with the shark, looked to his mother as if for reassurance that it was safe to get so close.

She smiled and told him: “Its mouth is big enough to fit your entire head in there,” knowing he wouldn’t have the nerve to do so.

As for Chase Andersen, he was back on the boat Sunday, trying once again to land his first mako.