Photo via RodneyAtkins.com
Rodney Atkins recently did something that thousands of parents do on a daily basis with their kids -- he took his son fishing. However, what started out as a normal day of fishing for small sharks turned into a battle of man against a Shaquille O'Neal sized beast.
Rodney tells Pittsburgh's Y108, that when his son Elijah got out of school, the two decided to head down to the Florida coast and do a little fishing with a guide Rodney knew. They were fishing for sharks, but got much more than they bargained for when they hooked a monster they weren't expecting.
“We were fishing maybe 200 yards from the shore”, Rodney remembers, “and we caught a 7 and a half foot, 400 pound bull shark.”
"I wound up fighting this thing for about two hours." When the giant predator finally surfaced into the beam of a search light? "Crazy, it was crazy,” Rodney admits. “It was bigger than Shaquille O’Neal, man, it was a monster.”
Rodney found it hard to keep his cool. “The guide’s talking about how, y’know, ‘This is a killer shark, this is a real man-eating shark’… 'Oh, my God’ and he pulls out a .22 pistol and starts firing, and blood squirtin’ up in the water, I’m goin’ ‘Oh, my God, what are we doin’ here?’”
There are no photos, and no trophy from their epic struggle. “It was a trip, but I’ll never forget it, and I don’t think Elijah will.”
It's quite the story to hear Rodney tell it. Unfortunately, the audio's not embeddable so you'll have to head over to Y108's website to hear the interview. However, if you'd like to see what it's like to battle a huge shark in an unexpected location, just watch the video below. It's enough to make a person stay out of the shallows.
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