Another record? 494.5-pound bull shark caught at Alabama fishing rodeo

For the second year in a row, anglers participating in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo brought in an apparent state record shark.

In the 2023 rodeo it was a 1,019-lb. tiger shark that broke a record set in 1990. The 2024 rodeo was held over the weekend, and when the weigh station opened for its final day on Sunday, a Bon Secour Butchers fishing team was already waiting to have a big bull shark lifted out of their boat, the Orca, by crane.

They knew it was big. They didn’t expect it to go 494.5 lbs., a figure that beats the current record of 448 lbs, 4 oz by more than 45 pounds. The current record was set in 2015.

“We were totally shocked,” said Adam Lyons, one of two captains on the vessel.

“I thought about 350,” said Tommy Bowyer, the team member credited with the catch. “Not 494.”

“We way under-estimated,” said Lyons.

At the rodeo’s concluding awards ceremony Monday evening, Bowyer accepted prizes for bringing in the rodeo’s biggest bull shark and for winning its Gulf Coast Hauling & Construction Bull Shark Jackpot, which paid out $6,000 for first place.

At the awards ceremony, Bowyer described the win as a team effort. The Argo was captained by David Stiller of Apex Shark Fishing Charter, with assistance from fellow captain Lyons. Those on the boat included Boyer and Michael Maguire.

Bowyer and Lyons said they spent a rough night on the water Saturday night. They’d initially planned to anchor in open water a few miles south of Fort Morgan that evening, but it was so stormy that they ended up motoring up through the mouth of the bay into more sheltered waters. At the break of dawn, they headed back out and began fishing off Dixey Bar, a sand bar that runs south from the tip of the Fort Morgan peninsula.

They might’ve underestimated the weight, but not the effort. The shark didn’t come easy.

“It was a couple of hours,” said Bowyer. “It was a while. It would get to the boat and take off again, get to the boat, take off again.”

They headed straight for the weigh station, which wasn’t even open yet. They weighed in the second fish of the morning, they said. Afterward they decided to call it a day.

“We thought about going back out for a tiger,” said Lyons. “But we were like, you know, we’ve got a bird in hand, we just got our asses kicked by the weather that night, we were ready to come home.”

The shark won’t officially be accepted as a new state record until the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources validates it. Lyons and Bowyer said the paperwork had been turned in.

Marcus Drymon and Sean Powers, two marine scientists who also serve as rodeo judges, said big sharks like this one provide important data to researchers working to understand the health of the Gulf and the species that populate it. Some shark species in the Gulf crashed after overfishing in the 1970s and ‘80s, they said. New records are a piece of evidence indicating that protective regulations are paying off.

“There was a period in the ‘90s and the early 2000s where the size of the sharks that won the rodeo was not nearly as big,” said Drymon, a professor at Mississippi State University who specializes in shark research. “And I think that was really suggestive of overfishing. We had over harvested these populations for decades, and so there just weren’t that many big fish out there. But as these populations have been protected for the past 30 years, these fish have been given more chances to grow, and their populations to increase in size.

“We would expect to see larger and larger sharks brought in under that scenario,” Drymon said. “So I think the fact that that happened last year with that really big tiger shark, and then again this year with that big bull shark, is just evidence that the management for sharks undertaken by NOAA Fisheries has been successful.”

“If anything, it indicates that the protections that have been put on sharks are paying off that we’re starting to see these la really large sharks reappear in our ecosystem,” said Powers. “The system seems to be returning to a system that has an abundance of large sharks and that’s good.

“There’s not a ton of these really big sharks out there, but there are some and all the ocean needs is some,” Powers said. “It doesn’t need a ton of them, but it needs the big sharks. Because big sharks eat small sharks, big sharks eat stingrays and we don’t want a bunch of small sharks and we definitely don’t want a bunch of stingrays.”

Powers said that despite the apparent increases in shark numbers, they number of documented shark attacks on humans has remained about the same over the years. Both scientists praised the Mobile Jaycees, who run the rodeo, for their longstanding willingness to partner with scientists. A corps of researchers staff a tent adjacent to the rodeo weigh station, where they collect samples and measurements from many of the species brought in. The big sharks undergo a particularly close examination.“The truth is, we don’t really know exactly what the status is of the stock of bull sharks in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Drymon. “They’ve never been assessed through the formal stock assessment process. … I think we just still lack sort of a baseline understanding of what the bull shark population in the Gulf of Mexico is doing.”

The data that comes from the rodeo helps fill that gap, he said, but it’s a selective process. Rodeo limits are set high, so that only big sharks can be weighed in. Consequently, only 15 sharks were brought in this year. “That’s just to limit the needless harvest of tons and tons of sharks that don’t have any chance of winning that category,” Drymon said. “Both the bull shark and the tiger shark have to be 80 inches fork length, which is quite a big fish.”

“The key scientific benefit with the big ones is the most important thing we need to learn about any fish species,” said Powers. “How old do they get? … Once those animals, fish or sharks, get really big, length or weight is a real poor indicator of age.”

“We try to understand about the individual and how that individual relates to its population,” said Drymon. “So, for example, we take all of the length measurements, how long it is, how big around it is, of course how much it weighs.But then the most important samples we take have to do with the animal’s life history. So we take a section of the vertebra to determine how old the fish is. Fish get aged just like trees get aged, where you count those concentric rings and those give an indication of the of the number of years that the tree has been alive, same thing with the fish, same thing with a shark.

“And we also try to understand the maturity status,” Drymon said. “Is this a juvenile fish?Is it a mature fish? We can do that by looking at the reproductive organs. In this case, you know, as a female, we look at whether or not she has pups inside her, whether or not she’s even able to reproduce.”

It turns out that not only can you not tell how old a shark is by looking at it, you can’t tell how mature it is either.

“We have a size at which we expect an animal to be mature, but it’s not very cut and dried,” said Drymon. “And Dr. Powers is absolutely right. It’s almost impossible to just look at the shark that size and have any idea how old it is. They grow very rapidly at first. But then their growth slows and so they reach a point where they’re not getting any longer. They may be getting a little bit fatter, but they are still, of course, getting older.”

“The other thing is how many offspring does a female produce?” said Powers. “And that is very difficult to get unless we sacrifice that fish. We’ve been talking to a radiologist who’s going to help us start ultrasounding the live fish to count that, but that’s still kind of a dangerous thing to do.”

A rodeo spokesman said that this year’s rodeo statistics included 6,052 tickets sold, 3,734 angers registered and 3,240 fish weighed in.

For the Bon Secour Butchers fishing club, this was a good one: Club president Robert Walker said he hopes attention from the record will raise the club’s profile and help draw sponsors to its considerable slate of activities. It fields teams in numerous coastal fishing events and runs some of its own as well.

“We host five inshore tournaments a year out of Tacky Jacks in Gulf Shores,” he said. “The most important one is the last weekend in October, titled ‘Fish for Families.’ We sponsor veterans and first responders to fish that event for free. All the fish go to the Morgan’s Chapel food pantry in Bon Secour.”

“We pretty much run the coolest fishing tournament other than Flora-Bama and ADSFR,” said Lyons. “There are so many prizes it’s insane. What’s totally special about our tournament, that one, is if you bring in a fish that’s edible, it is processed and provided to the food bank.” (Information on the group’s activities can be found at bonsecourbutchers.com and facebook.com/bonsecourbutchers.)

The Bon Secour Butchers gang isn’t just looking forward to that October event, however. Next July will bring the 92nd edition of the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, and they’ve already got their sights set on those shark records.

“We’ll break another one next year,” said Bowyer.

“We’re going to get tiger next year, for sure,” said Lyons.