Retired professional hockey player John McLean Jr. shared some remarkable footage reeling in a great white shark off the coast of Florida.
John shared the well-documented video on his YouTube channel Big John Shark Fishing Adventures for people to see how it all went down. At the time, John was with a group of seven anglers from Idaho and they were fishing with the only land-based fishing charter focused on catching sharks in Pensacola.
The group traveled by boat to the shores near Portofino Island and threw their lines in the water hoping to catch a shark. However, what they didn’t expect was to catch a high-level apex predator, or better known as, the king of the deep blue sea.
It took John, with the help from the group, 40 minutes to reel in the beast. As cool as it was, they didn’t want to keep it out of the water for very long so they quickly worked together to get the hook out of its mouth and pulled it back out into deeper water so it could swim off.
The members of the specialized fishing charter didn’t measure the shark but, according to National Geographic, great whites can grow to be an intimidating 15 feet long, weigh more than 2.5 tons, and swim up to 15mph.