Video: DP Thresher Shark
 

Posted earlier this week about my buddy's thresher shark in Dana Point. Got some decent gopro footage and made a quick edit today. Hope you enjoy :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dJxFm3nT-o

Awesome. Threshers are so cool looking and graceful! I especially love their airial displays.

sharks
 

Pretty new to fishing. What's the etiquette on keeping/releasing sharks? I know people are more likely to release given how much longer it takes for a shark to reach maturity. Cool video!

Not me. nice video!

M

Cool vid. Nice to have a buddy with a gopro!


As far as keeping them, they're delicious but don't even whisper it on the boards or you'll get destroyed in Commiefornia.

Yeah, it was super fun to watch. I love the way they swim. So much power with such little effort.

LOL thanks! Always keep the gopro on hand, just in case shit like this happens! (...or so I can hit record before I get run over by a boat and my family can use the footage to find the person who did it)

As long as you're not fishing in a restricted area, you can keep a thresher. Whether or not you should is a matter of opinion. My friend didn't keep this one for a few reasons:
1) We weren't set up to process something that large (no large kill bag in the truck, etc. Why harvest if a lot of the meat would go bad?).
2) We determined the shark was a younger female. It a takes a long time to reach maturity and they have low pupping rates (2-4 pups per pregnancy per year). We'd rather let a female go to make more threshers to catch!
3) The shark was foul-hooked in the pectoral fin. Even if we WANTED to keep it, it didn't feel right to put one on the gaff that didn't get a real fighting chance.
4) We both have a lot of respect for sharks and it was cool enough just to get that close and see her swim off after an awesome fight!

All that said, I would never judge anyone negatively if they decided to keep one. Apparently the meat is good and you can use the skin as leather to make things. It's a legal fish on hook & line. Personally I'd rather save room in the freezer for some jumbo bluefin and a few YT!

Got it. Thanks for the info.

I ate a ~180lb thresher one time because I thought it wasn't going to make it if I tried the release. In hindsight, I bet it would have been fine. Sharks don't die easy. I'll never try to eat and give away that much shark again. I still haven't gotten back a taste for thresher (or swordfish, or mako, which taste damn near the same) after eating nothing but grilled thresher tacos and thresher en escabeche for a week longer than I care to.

They're awesome to hook up on though. I bet you had fun! The aerial shenanigans are a hoot. I am not surprised by the foul hook. Lots of them get landed that way, as the tend to chew you off otherwise when you hook them on your 30-40# YT rig.

Hahaha good point! You have to REALLY like that particular meat if you're gonna stock up on 150-200# of it! Last season my buddy and I caught a 300lb bluefin on the kite, then came into a wide open BFT bite on the way back. We landed 3 more in the 60-80lb range. Ended up giving the "small" ones away to the guys working the weigh station at the dock because we knew we'd have our work cut out for us with the big one. Filleting, cleaning and vacuum-sealing all night. Way more meat than we needed. We gave away a 10-15# ziplock bag to anyone walking by the garage that night! All this was going through my head as he was reeling this shark in...

And I know it's really common to foul hook these guys, most often in the tail. If you reel them in backwards, their survival rates post-release drop significantly, which sucks. Fortunately this one was hooked in the pectoral fin on the right side, so she had PLENTY of energy to launch and thrash at the side of my buddy's kayak! He only got one little tail-slap on the top of his knee. You can hear him say "Ow." in the video.