A fisherman got a surprising close-up with a great white shark after hooking – and then battling with and releasing – the big fish off the end of San Clemente’s pier over the weekend.
A crowd gathered along the railing of the 1,300-foot-long pier to watch Ben Buell, 39, of Mission Viejo, reel in the roughly 8-foot-long shark after what he said was close to an hour.
Buell wasn’t sure what he had hooked until be was able to reel it close to the pier and raise its head out of the water.
“Probably close to 500 pounds,” Buell estimated. “Everybody was saying, ‘What is it? What is it?’ We wanted to say Mako, but we knew in the back of our heads it wasn’t a Mako. People were about to gaff it and we stopped and cut the line. It was gone.”
A lifeguard treated Buell for a cut to his ear that he suffered when someone tried to gaff the shark and the gaff flung back and got him on the shoulder and ear. He continued fishing, catching bonito, bat rays and a large sheepshead.
He also reported that his son Cody, 19, caught about a 100-pound shark and released it.
“Today has been nuts,” Ben Buell said while being interviewed on the deck of the pier. He said the line he was using was 40-pound test and he was using mackerel filets for bait.
Buell said he grew up in San Clemente and has been fishing from the pier for decades. He said that in the 1990s he caught sharks as heavy as 150 pounds from the pier but has never seen one anywhere near this big off the pier.
San Clemente lifeguards said they didn’t have a report on their log Sunday about a great white. The report they had received did not indicate a shark being this size.
They said they did have a report of white shark 6 to 7 feet long spotted off the pier three days earlier. Nick Giugni, marine safety officer, said lifeguards posted advisory signs along the beach from T-Street to Mariposa to alert the public that day.
Rocky Neidhardt, managing chef at The Pier Shack, a concession at the end of the pier, took photos of the shark and of people watching from the railing.
“I was amazed … I was kind of shocked they were here,” Neidhardt said, having read about great white sightings off Huntington Beach in recent weeks. “At the same time,” he said, “I was thinking this is their ocean, they’re probably everywhere.”
Ken Nielsen, a San Clemente commercial fisherman for the last 50 years, verified from a photo that the one pictured off San Clemente was a great white.
“I’ve never heard of one getting caught off the pier,” he said. “But there’s been enough of them around.”
Releasing the great white was the right move, since the sharks are protected by state law.
“You can hook them accidentally, which is what they did,” Nielsen said. “You can’t take them. You can’t gaff them.”
Contact the writer: fswegles@ocregister.com or 949-492-5127
