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Last SlideNext Slide^[1][2]

Joey Polk prepares the group’s rods and reels for a night of shark fishing in the Gulf of Mexico as the sun sets.(Photo: Photos by Bruce Graner/This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Story Highlights

• Land-based shark fishing from the pier or beach dates back to the early 1900s
• Polks participate in shark tagging program, to gather data on shark identity, movements and migration
• Earnie Polk has tagged and released more than 130 sharks

There's something mythical and primitive about the top land predator and the top sea predator wrestling for dominance between their worlds, where the dynamic Gulf waves meet a tranquil island beach.

Many nights under the glow of a star-cast sky along Santa Rosa Island, this epic battle plays out over the whine of a fishing reel and the roar of the surf. And all too often man's most feared predator of the sea, the shark, loses.

Such was the case on April 16, when a massive 805-pound mako shark proved no match for a north Santa Rosa County country man and his ­15-pound rod and reel and testosterone-fueled muscle power.

Joey Polk, 29, with the help of his cousins ­Earnie Polk, 43, and Kenny Peterson, 21, landed the female short-finned mako, the second biggest shark he's caught.

"You can't do that by yourself. That's team ­effort," Joey Polk said about the exhausting, hourlong tug of war to reel in the mako.

And just as they do with the many other of the hundreds of sharks they've wrangled to shore over the years, they quickly snapped photos and captured video of it.

Monster mako shark snagged from Gulf waters^[3]

They measured it and used a razor-sharp gig to pop a tag into the skin near her dorsal fin for shark researchers at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, before returning her back into her saltwater world.

On that April night, the fight took too much out of the mako, and despite all their efforts to revive her, including cradling her in their arms as they walked her back and forth in chest deep water for 15 minutes, she died.

A few days later, the large Polk family and friends in Milton and Harold feasted on deep fried portions of some of the 600 pounds of mako meat.

Her head will soon be used for tiger shark bait. Her sharp-toothed jaws will be dried out as a trophy. And it's likely one of her large, pointed teeth will be wrapped in the fishing line that caught her for Joey to wear as a pennant, just as all the Polks do with their prized catches.

"Hardly nothing goes to waste," Earnie Polk said in what seems to be the Polk family's signature accent, a Southern drawl that's almost poetic in its cadence of slowly drawing out syllables.

Land-based sharking fishing is as much a Polk family tradition as are the covered dish meals the large — 80 of them — family shares on holidays and weekends, the cousins explained during another night of shark fishing, a week after landing the mako. It's a hobby that has been handed down from father to son, cousin to nephew for four generations now.

Earnie Polk began shark fishing from Navarre Pier with his father, grandfather and uncles about age 5.

"My dad and his dad and another one of my uncles went in together and bought a fishing pole and fished for a while, and then they hung it up," said Earnie, who's taken on the role of patriarch fisherman. "It kind of teased me the rest of my childhood. When I got old enough to go on my own, I started going quite regularly."

It's a rite of passage for the other boys in the family to join Earnie, usually as teens, on the seemingly dangerous sport, even though they downplay the risk.

"This is the poor man's big game fish," Earnie Polk said as he readied his gear in hopes of landing another record-breaker. "We want something that's going to fight, something at the top of the food chain just like the guys out there marlin fishing. They get tired of catching bonito and king mackerel and tuna. They want what's eating that sucker out there. They see that other fish are eating it, and they want to catch him."

As he points out, the rich folk are doing it on million-dollar boats powered by hundreds of dollars in fuel. And twice, Earnie and Joey have out-fished their boat-based shark anglers during competitions and spent less than $100 doing so.

But make no mistake, the Polks have invested heavily in their gear. Each one of their rod and reels, and they each have several, is valued at $1,000.

Catching a big shark is what these anglers live for.

"To fight something like that and bring it to shore, it's unexplainable," Joey Polk said, searching for the right word to explain the feeling. "It's an adrenaline rush, and something we like to do. It's got a lot more meaning than just catching a fish."

They spend days, weeks, months catching and mostly releasing hundreds of sharks of all types in the 6- to 7-foot range.

"It's a lot of melodrama," Earnie Polk said. "A big shark like that don't swing by every day. It might swing by once a month, and if you're here to see it through then maybe you get to see it through. Joey's been in it a long time. He's only caught one other big one — the big tiger shark."

Joey Polk holds the International Land Based Shark Fishing Association record for that one, a 949-pound, 12-foot-9-incher he caught and released in 2010.

Earnie Polk holds two records, one for a 674-pound short-finned mako and one for a massive 928-pound tiger shark.

Noble tradition

Land-based shark fishing from the pier or beach dates back to the early 1900s in the United States, according to International Land Based Shark Fishing Association.

On Santa Rosa Island, the Polk family were pioneers in the extreme sport.

"Nowadays, there's probably 30 of us in the general area that fish the pier and beaches for shark," Earnie Polk said about the avid, local shark anglers. "During the winter, we fish the pier. Some days I go five or six days a week. I treat it like a job."

He's passionate about ensuring the survivability of the shark. And he's proud of the fact he and his cousins are participating in NOAA's cooperative shark tagging program, a research project initiated in 1962 aimed at gathering data on shark identity, movements and migration to better manage the stock.

Earnie has tagged and released more than 130 sharks for the program, a volunteer duty he takes seriously because he wants to make sure shark stocks thrive in the Gulf. He gets a special thrill out of receiving notifications from NOAA that one of his tagged sharks has been recaptured, sometimes years after he released it.

"It shows our techniques are working. They are surviving," he said of the methods the family uses to cause the least amount of harm to the shark, such as using circle hooks and lassos.

Earnie did not like throwing sharks back into the water off the pier because he realized the impact on the water likely hurt them. That's when he came up with the idea of lassoing the shark around the head.

"We head rope them off the pier," he said. "We don't gaff them. We lasso them, pull them up on the pier. Put a tag in them. Take the hook out. Put a tag line on them and lower them into the water."

"I don't want to hurt them when I'm turning them loose," he said. "That's why I use a circle hook. It gets them in the side of the mouth."

Traditional barbed J hooks get caught in their gills or stomachs, often killing the shark, he said.

"That's not what we're trying to do," he said. "We're trying to tag and release."

'Perfect' catch

On the night a week after landing the mako, the cousins and one of their best fishing buddies, — whom they call Uncle Bob, even though he's no blood relation — were at one of their favorite fishing sites on Santa Rosa Island trying for another big one.

They arrived about 6:30 p.m., just as the beginning sunset splashed orange and pink across a partially cloudy sky.

As the sunset deepened, and over the roar of waves pounding the beach, they spent the next hour hauling equipment to the beach and rigging eight poles with large, cut-in-half gamefish — bonito, jack crevalle, amberjack — they caught on pier-fishing trips.

They threaded sturdy, Dacron braided fishing line spooled on their reels through the eyes on their hefty poles.

Each line is rigged with a shock leader made of a thick, 1,000-pound monofilament line that is attached to metal line, which holds the hook and bait. Once the shark is reeled close to shore, one of them will grab it and help pull the shark in, the men explained about their tried-and-true routine.

One thing they would not divulge was their closely held secret method of attaching the bait, one they say ensures the shark can't shake the bait loose while more humanely hooking the shark.

They stab their rods about 18-inches into the sand near water's edge, which provides leverage when fighting the shark.

On this night, Earnie Polk is the bait man. For the next hour, as dusk began to envelope the men in darkness, Earnie boarded a small kayak, paddling the baited lines of two fishing poles at a time. He drops them 500 yards off shore into about 45 feet of water — the deep trough known to be home to the big boys, as the sharks are called.

On the first trip, Earnie can barely be seen by the glow of waning daylight bobbing in the choppy waves. On the next three trips, he's barely perceptible except for the tiny spot of light that shines out in the darkness from his head lamp.

His only beacon guiding him back to their fishing camp is the amber glow of a large propane-powered Coleman lantern on a pole.

No one on the beach seems to be the least bit concerned about Earnie as they busy themselves checking their poles and testing their drags to make sure it sounds out the click, click, click that notifies them they have a bite.

Uncle Bob attaches a glow stick to his line with a clothes pin since his vintage reel does not click loud enough to hear from their campsite against the dunes, a few yards away.

Once Earnie Polk returns, they all settle down at their camp — three large beach umbrellas tilted on their sides to break the brisk west wind, beach chairs and ice chests — and wait for the signature clicks that turn to whines when a shark darts away once hooked.

There's no telling when a shark will bite, although they explain sharks are more active hunting for food at dusk and dawn. Talking, sipping a few beers and just having "man" time is part of their experience, they explain.

But it wasn't long before reels started clicking and the anglers started running for their rods. The sharks got away twice.

Then Uncle Bob's line blasted off.

He dove for the reel, sat on the sand with the pole between his legs, and began pumping and releasing his body back and forth as he tugged and the shark pulled, in a rocking motion.

The three cousins scrambled into position, shining flashlights on the water as Uncle Bob towed the shark nearer to shore.

In a few minutes, the lights captured first the shark's glowing amber eyes, then its gray dorsal fin and tail thrashing in the water. One of the men grabbed the shock line and helped haul her in. Within a few minutes, the sandbar shark — a protected species — was in the shallows surrounded by the men.

Earnie Polk popped the bottom of her jaw with his palm and snatched the circle hook with a quick, well-versed motion.

They measured and tagged her, swiftly, as the 6.2-foot, roughly 85-pound sharked thrashed wildly, snapping her head around trying to nip the men. She wriggled wildly, trying to work her way back into the water.

They gave her a shove, and in a blink of an eye, she disappeared into the Gulf waves.

"That was perfect," Ernie Polk said of the quick catch and release the anglers performed like a carefully choreographed dance.

Not everyone would agree that aggressively pulling a majestic animal out of its element, even for a few minutes, just for sport is humane or ethical.

Nancy Kohler, chief of NOAA's apex predators program, however, said the Polks are contributing to important science, which, in the long run, will help the species survive.

"For the guys to be active in the program, and have the conservation ethics to not only release the fish they catch but to put a tag in them and agree to collect important information about them, that's very important. Our taggers in the Gulf are very important to us."

Fame

In the world of land based shark fishing, Earnie and Joey Polk are well known. Between them, they hold three International Land Based Shark Fishing Association world records. And according to the association's website, they stand out for the teamwork required to properly handle 1,000-pound animals.

The night the mako took Joey Polk's bait ended a three-month dry spell for the anglers.

It also ignited a media frenzy after the News Journal posted a photo of the mako in the back bed of Joey Polk's Toyota. The photograph was captured by Pensacola Beach resident Wes Calhoun.

That photo immediately went viral and brought the Polks worldwide fame and, hopefully, some fortune soon with a potential reality TV show and other opportunities knocking at their doors.

But being in the limelight comes with mixed emotions.

It flies in the face of their code of ethics of flying under the public radar screen about shark fishing.

They don't want a flood of amateur shark anglers exploiting the beach and the sharks.

And they don't want to send the wrong message to tourists that the water is not safe to swim in.

Nothing could be further from the truth, they say.

"It's that 'Jaws' scenario," Earnie Polk said. "Like the sheriff on 'Jaws' yelling, 'Oh, no. It's a shark! It's a shark!' That's how people still feel. They have not gotten past the mentality. Sharks are not going to eat everyone."

These men from the woods of Santa Rosa County should know. They've tangoed in the surf with hundreds of them.

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References

1. ^{^} Last Slide (www.pnj.com)
2. ^{^} Next Slide (www.pnj.com)
3. ^{^} http://www.pnj.com/story/news/2014/04/16/shark-caught-in-local-waters/7805801/ (www.pnj.com)