My Sharkathon ’24 Experience

After a long, exhausting summer spent battling giants, anglers gather for an authentic fall classic. Over the last two decades, a South Texas fishing tournament has garnered attention and built momentum in the sharking world. Appropriately dubbed Sharkathon, this unique event ranks as one of the largest surf fishing tournaments in the world.

In a tournament conducted with a very conservative mindset, anglers fishing Sharkathon must release all the fish they catch. Using a digital verification system, contestants submit photos of their catches at the closing ceremony. Officials then spend hours estimating the size of the many anglers' fish to determine an ultimate winner for each of the various divisions. For folks of all ages, this tourney emphasizes educating recreational anglers about our resources. Despite having a track record of catastrophic weather and tedious conditions over the years, one thing is guaranteed when Sharkathon begins―exciting things will happen.

This year's event marked the 20th anniversary of the tournament; I've been fortunate to have participated in all of them. Year after year, we witness crazy, chaotic things. After a lengthy official registration and check-in process, a mechanized herd of special shark-rigged vehicles stampedes the beaches, searching for places to pitch their weekend base camps.

Most years, we experience stormy, windy or otherwise difficult weather conditions. Often, the event happens just about the time cold fronts start rolling over the coast. But this year, on the eve of the start of the tournament, conditions looked pleasant and accommodating for a serious sharking trip.

Donating sponsors are considered VIP entrants and assigned early release numbers for the event. This year, family obligations required me to run a couple hours behind the normal start. I checked in late and began my journey south to the Padre Island National Seashore with my good friend Clark. Though the tournament directors recently expanded the boundaries to include the beaches all the way to the Port Aransas South Jetty, we prefer fishing more remote locations, so we headed to the southern end of the PINS boundary.

With leaders and rigs all prepped and ready for quick deployment, we arrived at our destination and set up camp during the mid-morning hours. While Sharkathon has many divisions in which anglers compete, including trout, redfish and tarpon, I focus entirely on catching sharks, so that I can fully dedicate my time to being in the kayak when necessary to deploy baits and do other chores related to the quest. With light winds whispering over the sand, the waves in the surf ran small, with the exception of random swells spilling onto the first or second sandbar every few minutes.

In these nearly pristine conditions, I utilized stingrays exclusively to attract the attention of sharks. On this weekend, I tethered bullet-shaped floats to all my big baits, as I usually do when targeting big sharks. I do this for two reasons.First, it allows me to visually keep track of all my gear. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I can retrieve leaders when and if a line gets cut.

I quickly deployed four large baits, all between 500 and 800 yards from the sand. After about an hour, something scraped against one of the lines and cut it. Despite running 200 or 300lb braided line, cut-offs do occasionally happen. In the weeks leading up to the event, the number was much higher than normal. Fearing a repeat of recent trips, when I had multiple lines severed in a short span of time, I made the decision to relocate farther north. I zipped out in the kayaks and retrieved my gear, then ran up the beach a few miles and set up again.

This time, I deployed four slightly larger rays, hoping they'd last through the night, as the sun had already begun making its slow descent toward the horizon. With four delicious baits out, we began to wait for an encounter with a monster. But history repeated itself within the first hour, when one of my lines was cut again by a passing menace.

Watching the area near my floats, I saw a commotion. Numerous tarpon rolled, making large boils on the water's surface. I wondered if one of them had cut my line as I tied a large snap swivel onto the kayak and began to row out to retrieve my leader. While I drew closer to the float, I witnessed more strange activity, lots of large boils, wakes and mud-stirs. I wondered if the tarpon were feeding aggressively, or if something else was happening.

Soon after I got to the float and clipped the leader onto the kayak, things took a turn for the worse. Within seconds, something ripped the leader out of my hand and started racing away, my float tracing a vapor trail on the water. My line, draped over the kayak, tangled briefly, and the force of the massive fish began dragging the kayak sideways, creating immediate danger. Luckily, I managed to quickly free the line from the boat, then watched as the shark dropped the bait after a run of maybe fifty yards. In the quiet beyond the gentle breakers, I sat stunned for a while, fairly certain of the identity of the culprit who had caused the chaos.

A couple hours later, in the gloaming, I kayaked out and retrieved two baits to swap for fresh ones, including the one that had been picked up and dropped earlier. On it, I could clearly see the bite mark. I had placed a 24/0 hook in the head of a roughtail stingray the size of a pizza. The arc cut by the shark's teeth covered just 3/4 of the ray. The marks proved what I already suspected―a large great hammerhead, while patrolling and harassing the tarpon, had stumbled upon my bait and picked it up. Hammers have relatively small mouths, compared with other giant sharks. The radius of this one's bite indicated a length somewhere between eleven and twelve feet.

Through the night, something chopped my lines, one by one. We killed time, surmising the source of the cuts, never clearly identifying one. The next morning, I retrieved all my baits and found them untouched, so I changed the plan and deployed them much closer to the beach, within no more than 500 yards. This accomplished one goal immediately, preventing more lines from being cut. Unfortunately, the rest of the weekend was quiet in my camp. I landed just a single six-foot blacktip.

Though this was clearly not my year to find glory in the Sharkathon, the weather made the experience enjoyable. The beautiful evenings provided some great opportunities to photograph the stars. I have to count my blessings and be grateful. After all, I've won and/or placed in five previous Sharkathons. I thank Clark for being patient and motivating me while I rowed roughly fourteen miles on the kayak over the long weekend.

As people began to gather at the official weigh-in, word spread that all camps had an unusually high number of cut-offs, some far more than the nine I endured. Utilizing floats, I was able to retrieve every bit of my gear, but others lost plenty. While my would-be winning hammer never made it to the show, young Jeffery Reyes used images of his star, an eight-foot bull, to claim the top prize in the wild and memorable Sharkathon 2024.