Fishing Reports News

This was to be their last hurrah, the final weekend of the 2006 rockcod fishing season for the Central Coast.

Four hours of plying the waters seven miles off Morro Bay had been very productive. Two members of the three-man party had bagged limits of rockcod and the third was one fish shy.

It was around noon Oct. 29 and Los Osos skipper Pete Newell suggested they call it a day. But Michael Boyce asked for one more drop in an attempt to catch his limit.

“I dropped down a fresh dead sardine and it was hammered by something big,” the Morro Bay resident said.

The 43-year-old thought he’d hooked a monster lingcod or maybe a huge halibut.

He was armed with quality equipment, a Penn 535 reel attached to a Penn 0711 rod. That was the good news.

Boyce, however, had a problem. He was only spooled with 30-pound test line aboard Newel’s 17-foot Arima Sea Chaser.

“I at least want to see what it is before I’m broken off,” he said he told Newel and Dave O’Halloran of Shell Beach.

“After multiple rounds of losing and gaining back line, we finally saw a florescent bronze color, a shark with a second dorsal fin and a large lobe on the top of the caudal (tail) fin. It’s a soupfin shark.”

After bringing the shark close enough to the surface, the trio agreed the next time they had to gaff the shark and get it into the boat — which they did about 30 minutes after the skirmish began.

“The shark was hooked in the corner of the mouth,” Boyce said. “The eye of the hook and the line were outside his mouth. It’s the only reason he didn’t break me off with his triangular, sharp-edged teeth.”

Newel cut the gills to bleed the shark. After it was gutted, the soupfin was stuffed into the fish hold along with 29 rockfish and Boyce’s 26-inch lingcod.

According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Web site, the shark was as big as male soupfins get — 6 feet, 5 inches and 100 pounds.

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