A Massachusetts family scored the kind of fishing story you usually have to embellish when they hooked a roughly 10-foot great white shark about a mile off Fort Lauderdale on Monday during a charter trip. Video shot on deck shows the crew and anglers, exhausted but buzzing, easing the protected shark alongside the boat before working to guide it back into deeper water.
The group was out on a Fishing Headquarters charter when the line suddenly went tight. After a long, grinding fight, the crew brought the shark to the boat and then released it. Anglers on board described the battle as both exhausting and surreal, according to CBS Miami. Donovan Smith, visiting from Reading, Massachusetts, said he and his father, Judd, traded off on the rod during the struggle. Mate Logan Graf called it a first in seven years aboard that particular vessel, while Captain Paul Paolucci told the outlet he has landed six white sharks since 2003.
Why white sharks turn up off South Florida
“We know that they're present off of our coasts especially in the cooler months of the year,” Dr. Catherine Macdonald, director of the University of Miami’s Shark Research and Conservation Program, said, according to CBS Miami. Researchers say that better tagging and tracking technology is making offshore white sharks easier to detect, which helps explain why sightings have been ticking up.
Protected species and the law
The crew’s choice to free the shark was not just good form, it was required. NOAA Fisheries lists the white shark as a prohibited species in U.S. waters, which means anglers are not allowed to keep them. Those protections are designed to support the species’ recovery and to shape how fishermen and charter operators respond when they accidentally hook one.
Charter context
The outing was run by Fishing Headquarters, which offers near-shore sportfishing trips a short ride off the Fort Lauderdale coast. Those runs follow the Gulf Stream close to the continental shelf, an area where big game fish — and occasionally large sharks — tend to show up.
For the Smith family, it turned into a story they will be retelling for years: an all-out tug-of-war, a rare close-up look at an apex predator, and a careful release that sent the shark swimming away. The footage serves as a reminder that encounters like this can be dramatic and still end safely for protected animals when crews stick to established handling rules.
