12-year-old boy reels in great white shark off Fort Lauderdale coast

Talk about a catch!  A 12-year-old boy visiting Fort Lauderdale from New England was out fishing Tuesday morning and hoping to catch something, but he likely didn’t expect to pull in a great white shark.

The boy and his mother, visiting from Massachusetts, were in a small charter fishing boat about one mile off the coast of Fort Lauderdale when the boy put tuna on his fishing hook.

A little bit later, the boy felt a tug on the line and ended up wrestling with the shark for about 45 minutes before he was able to pull it in — with the assistance of others.

“That is 100 percent a goddamn shark!” someone said.

“You guys got a giant great white!” one of the crewmembers said when they realized what was on the other end of the line. “This is like the most sought-after fish in the ocean.”

“This is a no-brainer for hanging on the wall,” one of the crew members said.

But the boy and his mother and crew members ultimately decided to tag the fish and throw it back into the Atlantic Ocean.

Great white sharks, according to many experts, are like snowbirds, meaning they have migrated to the warmer waters off of Florida’s coast to escape colder waters up north.

Ocearch, a non-profit marine research foundation, is tracking shark activity online and sending that data to researchers in an effort to study shark migrating habits.

According to Phys.org, tracking data from several sharks have been recorded in the waters off of Florida’s coastline.