Great Hammerhead Shark

Edisto hammerhead: Youngest of them makes his mark on fishing

When I think of shark fishing in the Edisto Beach area and specifically of shark tournaments, I can’t help but remember Paul Drew of North, who single- handedly kept the tourney going during good times and bad. Paul absolutely loved shark fishing and most times when my friends and I were in the sound or in the trough off Edisto Island, you could count on seeing Paul’s Whaler anchored up in his hole.

Paul passed on before his time but left a lot of friends and his legacy on the island. I am happy to find that Freddy’s Taxidermy of Walterboro has taken up the baton. Along with the Thirsty Fish Bar and Grill and Edisto Watersports, they have continued the tourney.

On June 11 the Edisto Watersports and Thirsty Fish Shark Tournament blasted off from the marina. One of the 22 boats was owned by Scott Hiott of Walterboro. It carried three other souls, a couple of seasoned anglers in Freddy Avant and Bax Culler and one novice, 14-year-old Hunter Sutcliffe of Orangeburg. The boat left the dock at 5 a.m. and ran out about 15 miles to one of the many wrecks off St. Helena.

They anchored over a 70-foot hole and dropped a fillet of barracuda about halfway to the bottom on a float. At 8:20 the deep rod twitched and then made a steady whine. Bax took the rod and set the hook. When the three older guys saw how heavy the shark was, they decided they didn’t want anything to do with it and handed the rod to the novice. He may not have known at that point that he was into an hour-and-half struggle but the rest of the crew did as they dropped the anchor line on a float and allowed the big fish to pull the boat away from the wreck. The 80 pound-reel and the energy only youths possess brought the fish to the surface after about 45 minutes. They saw the full girth of the great hammerhead come out of the water a hundred yards away and continued to work the boat closer. At this point, the hammerhead had pulled the boat a mile and a half from the wreck and he was tiring. Hunter said he had never had anything pull so long and so hard against him and he was tiring as well.

When the big shark came to the boat, the guys knew they probably had a winner, but they hadn’t handled one so big before. The huge forked tail wouldn’t allow them to tail rope the shark, so they had to toss a line around the head and pull him against the boat first. Once secured they were able to pull a line around the tail and club the shark with a baseball bat. That was the end of the fight but only the beginning of the work. Captain Scott was prepared for loading a large fish. He had fashioned a wooden slide that sat over the stern of the boat. Even with four men pulling and working it was still quite a chore pulling the 10-1/2-foot shark over the transom.

OMG Trivia | Jun-25-2011 | Great Hammerhead Shark | One More ...

Carter has always been fascinated by the odd look of these guys so today he decided to do his trivia on them.  The Great Hammerhead Shark is the largest species of Hammerhead.  An active predator with a varied diet, known prey of the great hammerhead include invertebrates such as crabs, lobsters, squid, and octopus, bony fishes such as tarpon, sardines, sea catfishes, toadfish, porgies, grunts, jacks, croakers, groupers, flatfishes, boxfishes, and porcupine fishes, and smaller sharks such as smooth-hounds.

The streamlined body of the great hammerhead with the expanded cephalofoil is typical of the hammerhead sharks. The teeth are triangular and strongly serrated, becoming more oblique towards the corners of the mouth. There are 17 tooth rows on either side of the upper jaw with 2–3 teeth at the symphysis (the midline of the jaw), and 16–17 teeth on either side of the lower jaw and 1–3 at the symphysis.

The average great hammerhead measures up to 11.5 ft long and weighs over 500 lb. A small percentage of the population, mostly or all females, are much larger. The longest great hammerhead on record was 20 ft. The heaviest known great hammerhead is a 14.4 ft long, 1,280 lb female caught off Boca Grande, Florida in 2006. The weight of the female was due to her being pregnant with 55 near-natal pups.

So here are Carter’s questions:  The electro-receptors that line the shark’s head wings detect electrical signals as low as one-millionth of a volt.  Tell us how many ‘million’ times weaker that signal is compared to the faintest signal a human can detect?  Also, although no one really knows how many of these sharks are swimming in our oceans, they are facing a severe threat which is causing these apex predators to be added to the Endangered list.  Tell us what that threat is.

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