Virginia Beach Fishing Report, Virginia Beach Shark Fishing Charter

09/18 - Today I had Mark Dias and friends aboard for a day of inshore fishing. These guys were from Cape Cod and all they wanted to do was "get a wicked big shaaahk". For those of us who arent from Cape Cod, this translates to "catch a large shark". We started off bait fishing first thing. The bait fishing was very slow, but eventually we made bait. Then we looked for cobias on the way to the sharking grounds. We saw none. After that, we began shark fishing. Shark fishing is a slow waiting game and these guys were prepared to wait for their bite and so were we. We put the chum out and waited. We had a couple of bites from smaller sharks and we caught a couple of smaller sharks, but we were not fishing for smaller sharks. We wanted the biggest meanest thing we could get a hold of. We did have a couple of big bites, but there was a couple of mishaps and tackle failures that ended up in a no catch. With big sharks, you really have to have your gear straight. These things have a million ways to get gone and if you do not have it right, you just are not gonna catch them. Finally, late in the trip, we get the right bite. This is no small shark, and it is serious about not coming near the boat. It made a very long initial run that almost dumped the 30# gear we had it hooked on. Eric settled in for the battle and it was on. After a one and a half hour long tug of war, we finally had the fish boatside. It was a 7' bull shark. Normally a fish like this would be released, but Mark specified that he wanted to kill the fish, that the fish would be eaten, and none of the fish would be wasted, so I agreed to gaff it. This fish put up just as much of a fight to get into the boat on the gaff as it did on the rod. We got it in the boat though. Mission "wicked big shaaaahk" complete.