A Class All Its Own
Blood-and-guts fly fishing for sharks on the Gulf.
By Steve Kantner
Sooner or later, we all think about it. I mean cranking a fly reel drag down and seeing how hard we can pull. Friend and reel-maker Ted Juracsik did it 30 years ago when he trolled a cedar plug on a fly outfit for tunas. Call me crazy, but some anglers may be happy to know that the spirit lives on.
You can almost hear "that sound-track" as a hefty hammerhead closes in on Brian Saners' streamer.
For fly fishermen, the great offshore represents the final frontier. It?s out here in the domain of tunas and billfish that we still find quarry too tough to boat with regulation fly gear. Sharks?at least the large oceanic varieties?are prime examples. Although inshore fly fishermen have managed to land some pretty impressive specimens, some sharks of the open sea continue to elude capture. This, for a masochistic few, makes deepwater shark fishing with its attendant physical torture, worth the effort.
Chasing sharks with fly gear has always been considered an iffy proposition. The big ones suffer from limited vision and aren?t likely to pursue a castable fly. Then there?s the all-too-frequent problem of cutoffs, normally not the result of angler error but usually because of the shark?s abrasive skin. Stated simply, you can do everything right and still lose the fish of a lifetime. That brings the audience rating for offshore shark fishing down near absolute zero.