(Brevard County, Florida)
By Wade Senti:
Our day began with a late start. We expected to drop our baits at sunrise but arrived around 9 a.m. We quickly set up a sunshade tent, rolled the fishing cart down with our gear and carried the kayak to the spot. My family has fished the coastlines of Brevard County since the mid-1990s, long before kayaks became so popular when you used surfboards to get your bait out well beyond the surf. My father has recorded some noteworthy catches with this technique using live bait on conventional reel setups.
On this day, we picked up some frozen bonita from a local bait shop and were specifically targeting sharks for catch and release. I brought two heavy conventional reel setups, a spinning setup for tossing in the trough and a heavy surf rod for tossing lures into the surf. We planned for a long day of fishing in southern Melbourne Beach.
I spread our rod holders down the beach, set up our rods and began arranging the fishing rigs. We use custom rigs for sharks. The one I used to beach an enormous hammerhead in early July consisted of a 20/0 circle hook (debarbed), 6 feet of 600-
pound coated steel leader and approximately 10 feet of 300-pound mono shock leader. I’ve found debarbing circle hooks makes for easy and quick hook removal, especially with smaller sharks, such as blacktips.
We took turns dropping the baits with our kayak, the shortest being about 175 yards and the longest around 250 yards off the beach. Our baits were secured by tying about 8 feet of breakaway biodegradable twine at the hook eye with a cement block piece at the end.
The baits sat for five and a half hours before we got any action. At this point, I figured the crabs had picked apart our bonita and the day was done. We were cooling off in the water when my buddy’s, Pete Filiberto, Penn International 80w went off. He ran out of the water, but the bait had been taken. I saw a little activity with my rod but figured a sea turtle had passed over the line. Less than five minutes later, that hypothesis had changed. The deeper drop proved worthy.
My tuned-up Penn 12/0 Senator began screaming, and I told my buddy to grab the plate and belt, while I tightened my newly 
upgraded drag to full. We struggled to get the belt in place, so I ended up fighting with the rod butt in the sand; it was nature’s fighting chair.
I kept the pressure throughout the struggle with my 125-pound Bullbuster mono line. The fight lasted approximately 30 minutes, standstill at times, but I never lost much gain. A few equipment malfunctions such as my handle grip coming loose and my shorts falling off didn’t stop me from successfully landing and quickly releasing the enormous hammerhead.
I was exhausted. We did not have time to tag or measure it, but we believe it was at or over 10 feet in length.