This story, “Big-Game Fishing’s Greatest Catch,” appeared in the April 1984 issue of Outdoor Life. Maxwell’s 1964 tiger shark remains tied for the all-tackle world-record (with a shark caught off the coast of Ulladulla, Australia in March 2004). All but two line-class records for tiger sharks — including Maxwell’s fish and another caught in Florida — are out of Australia.
THE TIGER SHARK was four times heavier than the muscular stonemason who was bracing his 190-pound, six-foot body against the shark’s first run. His 16/0 big-game reel gave line grudgingly and his heavy rod bent in a tight arc as the shark surged away from the pier with a huge hook embedded in its jaw. A multi-strand wire leader and 130-pound-test line connected the shark with the man who was soon to set a world record that still stands — and do it from a fishing pier, not a well-equipped boat.
It was the afternoon of Saturday, June 13, 1964, and the beach near Cherry Grove pier, north of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was dotted with vacationers enjoying the sand and surf. Most of them paid no attention to the angler far out on the pier. The tiger shark had taken the bait at about 2 p.m. and the rapid-fire click of the reel had galvanized Walter Maxwell and his shark fishing friends. Maxwell put the butt of his rod into the socket of his rod belt and clipped the custom-made shoulder harness to the rings of his reel. He and the shark were locked in combat. Maxwell had great respect for big sharks. He had seen sharks that were brought to the pier grab pilings in their jaws.
The first run of Maxwell’s first giant shark was, in his words, ” … strong, steady, unconcerned. I let him run several hundred yards.” Surprisingly, Maxwell was able to fight the shark back to the pier several times. After an hour of runs by the shark and Maxwell’s muscular pumping and reeling, the shark was alongside the pier.
Maxwell still thinks that his first tiger shark came in too easily. “I believe,” he told me, “that a really big shark doesn’t feel threatened very much by feeling the hook and that the shark will swim toward the fisherman to see what’s holding him.”
Whatever the reason, Maxwell’s strength and the shark’s apparent unconcern put one of Maxwell’s friends in danger. Jim Michie, from Columbia, South Carolina, had fished for sharks on Padre Island in Texas and had helped introduce Walter Maxwell to shark fishing from piers. Michie stood ready with a 16-foot, fiberglass vaulter’s pole solidly attached to a huge gaff hook. But the pole and stainless-steel gaff hook were not enough to hold that huge shark after a fight that had lasted only an hour. The shark was “green” — fresh and untired.
“None of us realized how big that fish really was,” Michie recalled. “When I leaned over the railing to set the gaff, I thought ‘My God, [‘II never be able to hold this fish.’ The thing looked like a cow wallowing in the heavy swells. It was about 18 feet in length and must have gone at least 2,500 pounds.”
Michie was pulled tight against the railing of the pier when the gaffed tiger thrashed in the swells. Then Maxwell’s hooks pulled free and Michie was left trying to hold the shark with only the gaff. No human being could hold such a monster with its strength still unspent. With the fall of a wave, the gaff was pulled from Michie’s hands and Maxwell’s first tiger shark was free. It swam out to sea with the gaff still embedded in its mouth and the pole jutting above the waves.
Even though Maxwell wanted to set a world record, he was out for sport, too. “I was fishing for sport, and losing one fish didn’t interfere with that,” he said.
Maxwell and his friends dreamed of catching a world-record shark from a pier. The fact that big sharks could be taken from shore was well known to a few anglers, such as Jim Michie, who had done it himself. It was easier to fish for sharks from the pier than from the beach. You could fish the whole weekend-day and night-from a pier more easily than you could fish from a boat, and for a lot less money.
“As far as we were concerned, the pier was our only possible chance at a big shark,” Maxwell recalled.
Maxwell, Michie, and another South Carolinian, M.C. Meetze, spent many summer weekends on the Cherry Grove pier. They often slept there, but they were always alert for the alarmlike click of their big-game reels. They had studied the Inter national Game Fish Association (IGFA) rules for establishing an all-tackle record. Among many other stipulations, the rules specified that no one was allowed to touch the angler or his equipment while he was battling the fish. In other words, no one could help the angler to fight the fish.
Maxwell is quick to give his friends credit, though. “Michie knew a lot about fishing for sharks,” Maxwell recalled recently. “He had 9/0 and 12/0 reels that were big enough to use for monster sharks, but I decided to invest in my own rod and reel. Michie built the rod for me using a 39-thread, Shakespeare, fiberglass blank with Mildrum guides. It was designed for shark fishing.”
Meetze’s big contribution was a hand crafted fighting harness made out of half a cowhide with one-inch-wide leather straps that would not cut into the angler’s shoulders. Maxwell’s final piece of equipment was a wide, leather, rod belt with a socket for the rod butt.
Maxwell’s 16/0 Penn Senator reel was about the size of a bowling ball, and was filled with 1,400 yards of Ashaway Dacron line, testing 130 pounds. The line was strong enough to anchor a fair-size boat.
After the loss of Maxwell’s first tiger shark on Saturday, no more big sharks were hooked that day. Evening came, and then night, and the curious onlookers that had gathered to watch the battle between man and shark drifted away. The night brought rain squalls and heavy seas, but Sunday dawned fair. Several skates — raylike fish— were caught before noon and rigged on 14/0 hooks and wire leader. Bill Smith, a regular on the pier, again took these baits out in a small boat and dropped them well away from the pier. Only one shark had been landed all morning, an 11-foot dusky.
From time to time, a small shark picked up a bait only to drop it again. Then, Maxwell recalled, “A herd of big boys came in there.”
One of them picked up the skate Maxwell was using for bait and ran with it. Apparently, that shark bit through the wire leader connecting the top hook to the bottom hook.
“It was a strong run, but I didn’t hook him,” Maxwell said. “I don’t think it was the same shark I eventually landed because there was no hook or wire leader in its stomach when we checked later.”
“In the afternoon,” Michie recalled, “Nick Laney, another fisherman, hooked a big tiger about 11 feet long. We could see the stripes clearly when the fish came by the pier the first time. I was on the sand under the pier with the beached dusky when Nicky’s shark bit. I scrambled back onto the pier and saw his fish. we· knew he couldn’t bring the fish to gaff from the pier.”
Laney’s 9/0 reel and 50-pound-test line were too light!
As Maxwell watched Laney’s shark surging left and right and out to sea, another fish hit his own bait. The click was on but the reel was not in gear. The drag was set at about 30 pounds, pretty stiff by Maxwell’s own admission.
“When he hit the bait, the shark just went out on a straight line. It was a stronger run than the one I had had on Saturday.”
Suddenly the shark leaped clear of the water. The sound of the splash shocked the anglers and the spectators.
“When that fish jumped, it was only about 30 yards off the end of the pier, almost in the surf,” Maxwell told me.
At about the same time, a herd of sharks hit the other baits, and some lines were broken. Then Maxwell’s line was smoking out again. He had placed his rod butt in the socket of his belly plate and locked the drag on his reel. He was immediately pulled forward and down onto the pier’s deck. Loosening the drag, Maxwell stumbled to his feet and tried to control the bucking rod and reel. Onlookers gasped when the giant tiger shark jumped again some 500 feet from the pier.
“There was a tremendous crashing sound, not like a king mackerel or even a sailfish,” Maxwell recalled.
Was Maxwell afraid? What if the reel had seized up? Would he have been dragged into water that was evidently swarming with big sharks?
Some two decades after the event, Max well can afford to be calm and he insists that there was no great danger. Being dragged against the chest-high pier railing and into the water was just a remote possibility, and there was always a sharp knife handy to cut the line.
The only danger that Maxwell was concerned about was losing his second big tiger shark of the weekend. Maxwell’s shark made a long run to the north and Laney’s ran to the south. The fishermen had decided that the only way Laney could land his fish was to bring it to the beach well away from the pilings of the pier.
“The last time I saw Laney with the fish still on was after he had jumped from the pier onto the beach. He was running down the beach with about 40 people behind him,” Maxwell recalled. Laney’s tiger was lost later when it charged under the pier and broke off on the pilings.
“A lot of people were coming out on the pier. Nicky’s shark had already drawn a lot of people,” Maxwell told me.
Maxwell’s friends tried to keep the crowd at a distance by roping off the end of the pier to give him room to fight the shark.
“The water was clear, and you could see the dark stripes against the gray of its body,” Maxwell remembered. “The stripes were not as distinct as they are on a smaller tiger, but they were there.
After the second jump, the fish put its head down and ran northeast, taking al most all the line out. Maxwell struggled to slow the run; Michie poured Coke bottles of water onto the overheated reel drag. The shark was more than three-quarters of a mile from the pier when Maxwell finally succeeded in bringing the fish to a gradual stop. He held it still for 30 seconds with straining arms, shoulders, and back. The man’s strength was augmented by his tackle, but the shark sulked near the bottom with the huge steel hook set in its upper jaw, just outside the teeth.
Maxwell’s greatest piece of luck had come when he hooked the shark at the start of the fight. If the wire leader had been in side the shark’s mouth when it clamped down on the bait, its notched teeth probably would have cut through even the heavy wire leader sometime during the fight. But the lower hook had apparently been bitten off by another shark and the upper hook was embedded in the upper lip, outside the multiple rows of teeth. After the fight was over, Maxwell had to cut the hook out of the shark’s lip.
“The hole that big hook made didn’t enlarge at all during the long fight,” Maxwell recalled.
Maxwell had to run backward and reel madly to take in line when the fish finally moved and made another fast and powerful run to the southeast. Again, luck was with the angler. When there was only a few hundred feet of line on the reel, the tiger ran parallel to the beach, toward the pier, instead of surging out to sea. Maxwell reeled as fast as was humanly possible to gather up the slack line. The fish stopped near the pier, but only for a few seconds. Again it ran, and again the line on the spool dwindled from seven inches to the diameter of a 50-cent piece. The fish came charging in again, turned, and headed away once more. Each time, Maxwell cranked the line in only to see it streak from the spool again, even though he tightened the drag cautiously. Three times the shark leaped completely clear of the water.
“On its first three runs that shark could have taken out all my line. Of course, it would have snapped,” Maxwell recalled, “but the tiger seemed to want to come back to the pier to see what was up. That shark surfaced and looked over the situation. “The fourth and fifth runs took the line down to the diameter of a silver dollar.”
It was about 4 p.m. by then, and the fish kept running to the northeast.
Maxwell got some relief by sitting on a high, wooden bench with his feet braced against the rail. When an angler hooks a big fish from a boat, he can sometimes set the hook and let the fish pull the boat as well as struggle against the line, and the boat can move toward the fish. Padded fighting chairs, swiveled to point the rod in the direction of the surging fish, also help a lot. But Maxwell just sat there on the hard, wooden bench. Even with the lever age of the big-game rod, his arms were weakening and he felt the effect of turning the reel handle thousands of times. His friends continued to pour water on the hot reel. Maxwell was hot, too, and very tired, but he knew that the fish was also tiring.
Now Maxwell’s in his mid-50s; he still plays softball in a local league and often belts homeruns. “Here comes the old man; get the outfielders back” is what they say, according to Maxwell’s own smiling testimony.
Twenty years ago, on that sunny, Sunday afternoon, he was in good shape and in the prime of his strength. He knew that the shark was expending more energy than he was and that he was winning.
During the long afternoon, the shark made some 30 runs and it was clear that the tiger was losing its strength.
“He was near the pier several times,” Maxwell said,”but we had gaffed a green fish the day before and had realized our mistake.”
It was about half-tide when the shark was brought toward the pier for the last time. Maxwell had been fighting it for 4½ hours. He strained against the weight of the powerful fish and his heavy tackle. By now, he could see where the shark was hooked and he took advantage of the lip hook-up to pull the huge mouth open.
The gaff that Michie held in his hands differed from the one that had been wrenched from his grip the previous day. This gaff hook was also attached to a fiberglass pole but, in addition, a rope was tied to the eye of the gaff in case the pole broke or was wrenched away.
Michie wanted to gaff the fish inside the mouth. As he put it, “A big fish like that gaffed in the dorsal area or in the body can tear loose from the gaff.”
Michie struck with the gaff, and the shark brought its primitive forces into play again and tried to surge away. The pole pulled out of the gaff hook and Maxwell’s friends pulled tight on the rope.
“Once that shark was gaffed, he was caught,” Michie told me. “Jim waded out beneath the pier and put a head rope and a tail rope on him and we dragged him onto the sand.”
Jim Michie was the first to say it: “There’s no doubt — that’s a record.”
It was after 6 p.m. A wrecker was called to lift the fish up onto a flatbed truck. Bushels of shrimp and what seemed like barrels of seawater and half-digested food spewed up from the maw of the shark. The fish was already beginning to lose weight and the company of shark anglers still had to truck the fish to a scale big enough to weigh it.
It was not until 9 a.m. on the following day that the fish was weighed on the government-certified truck scale at Ford’s Fuel Service in Loris, South Carolina. The temperature had been in the 80s late Sunday afternoon, and dehydration overnight probably took at least 10 percent of the shark’s weight, in addition to the weight lost with the stomach contents. Even so, notary public Jessie Ruth Graham attested to a weight of 1,780 pounds, a girth of 103 inches, and a length of 13 feet 10.5 inches.
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Maxwell’s tiger shark weighed 350 pounds more than the previous IGFA all tackle record. Allowing for dehydration overnight and the loss of the stomach contents, it is very likely that Maxwell had been battling a shark that weighed more than a ton. And he caught the monster shark from a pier, a feat unmatched in the entire history of big-game fishing.
(Fishing for big sharks from South Carolina piers is now forbidden by local laws because it endangered swimmers. Many pier operators in North Carolina have also banned this form of fishing. In these states and in some others, fishermen now put their baits out from a small boat launched from a deserted beach. —The Editors, 1984)
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