Shark chases fish to Samaritan anglers

If you didn’t see it, it’d be hard to believe that angler Roshad Goff, without a hook or line, caught a 30-pound permit jack.

Maybe even more astounding: A hungry hammerhead shark chased the fish straight into his hands in a breathtaking encounter.

Goff and his partner Glenda Pino spent a weekend baiting their lines in the West Action Angling Tournament but on Sunday, 12 Jan., fishing gear wasn’t needed when they noticed splashing on the ocean’s surface, while on their way to Rum Point.

“We saw commotion in the water and initially we thought it was a shark after a stingray, so we decided to get closer,” Pino told the Compass.

With hopes of chronicling the disturbance, Pino began recording on her phone and was amazed – an adult hammerhead shark on the hunt.

Unfortunately for the shark it was outsmarted when his prey found a safe spot to hide.

“The fish must’ve seen an opportunity to get between the boat and the engine and that’s when Rashad saw the opportunity,” Pino recalled.

Goff, who comes from a prominent Caymanian angling family, bravely reached down with the shark about 4 feet away from his hand, grabbed the estimated 30-pound permit by the tail and pulled him aboard.

“So much was happening all at once. I think I did a pretty good job at capturing the video with everything that was happening,” Pino said, noting that she had never seen a hammerhead before, which made the experience even more astounding.

“We are always out on the water, but I’ve never seen a hammerhead. We’ve seen sharks off 12-Mile Bank but nothing like that.”

‘We do have hearts’

A fish that size for many anglers would become Sunday dinner, but Goff and Pino gave it a second chance at life after all the permit’s efforts to escape becoming shark food.

“We felt bad for the fish, we do go out fishing all the time, but we do have hearts,” Pino said. “Usually, we would say this is good for a boil down, but it was like, we just saved you from a shark so why would we now eat it?

“So, we put it in the live well, and we moved out further away from the shark; we could see that the fish was really stressed out, so we wanted to make sure that the shark didn’t find her again.”

While fish can only communicate through gesture, motion, smell and electrical impulses, if they could in fact tell stories to one another, that lucky permit would have a tale for the ages.

For Goff and Pino, the excitement didn’t stop there.

They went from saving a fish’s life from a hungry shark to witnessing the potential creation of other sea life.

“Right after, that there was some more commotion, but it was two turtles mating,” Pino said, with a laugh. “That day, it was a really nice experience.”