"The MACO MADNESS Shark Tournament - June 25,2008"

THE STORY: Welcome to my personal SHARK gallery, This gallery contains images taken during my first ever Shark Fishing Trip when myself & 5 of my cousins decided to charter a boat and enter the 2005 East Coast Shark Tournament. As 'LUCK' would have it about 6 hours into the trip I hooked into a 393 lb. 15'-6" THRESHER SHARK'. Since we were fishing as a TEAM everyone had a chance on the rod at this big boy which took us a little over an hour to land. the largest fish I had caught up to this point was a 22 lb. blue fish so to say the least I was SHOCKED at the power behind this monster. When I first hooked it I would have sworn that someone attached a DUMP TRUCK to the end of my pole and dropped it off the side of the boat. At 5'10" & 160 lbs. I was a little out weighed and out gunned by the shark. Several times I was almost pulled over board but luckily I was able to brace myself in the corner of the boat before losing my balance and possibly becoming shark bait myself.

The best part of this story is that my cousin Walter was in charge of bringing the video camera, well he did but 60 seconds into filming my ONCE IN A LIFE TIME Catch the battery that wasn't charged died !!! Thank goodness I always have a camera with me as did Walter and we got plenty of stills to document the trip, some of which I have posted in this gallery for you to enjoy. To top it all off, Walter was also in charge of entering us into the various tournaments for the weekend, being very expensive & costing us about (about $750) he entered us in 4 of the 5 tournaments, all being MACO Shark entries and leaving out the most important one being the BIGGEST 'ANY' SHARK pool, which turns out that I HAD the LARGEST Shark of any kind caught during the 2 day tournament which WOULD have netted us a cool $28,000.00 ($4,666.00 EACH) in prize money! Thinking I had won after the boat Capt. informed me it was the largest shark caught I was elated right up until Walter informed me that he didn't have an entry ticket for the Tournament and I would go home with empty pockets. Needless to say myself along with my other cousins threw Walter over board and made him swim the 70 miles we were off shore back to the docks LOL (only kidding) . . . We were only 68 miles off shore ROTFL . . . OK we didn't make him swim but we really WANTED him too :)

Well I was able to get some great shots of the sunrise, us having fun fishing as a family/team and the shark. All in all it was a great weekend and a dream come true for me, we had our pictures & the story in all the major news papers here in N.J. and I have a great scrap book and memories that will last a life time. Oh BTW We all forgave Vadj for the laps in judgement on the entries & the dead video camera battery LOL, I love him like my own brother! I hope you enjoyed my FISH Story & the gallery of shots, "Please feel free to comment on any of your favorite images" !

PS: All images in this gallery were shot with a Nikon D70 !

Best Regards,
~BILL~