As the 2023 Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo wound down on Sunday, its shark categories remained active.
Nothing hit the docks to rival an apparent state record-breaker brought in on Friday, a 1,019-pound tiger shark caught by Brett Rutledge.
Excitement about that remained high among rodeo officials, because it appears to smash the longstanding record of 988 pounds, 8 ounces set in 1990 by Larry Gene Eberly of Gulf Shores.
But there were some fresh shark tales on the rodeo’s closing day.
One of the best involved brothers Danny and Mark Winstanley, who weighed in a 410.6-pound Tiger Shark and a smaller bull shark.
Logos on the side of their boat, a Contender named “Hey Sport,” revealed that it was a boat given away at the 2003 rodeo. Danny Winstanley’s son Dillon, then 12, won it in a drawing.
20 years later, the boat still looked sharp – and the Winstanley brothers were pursuing a hobby that they’ve enjoyed since youth.
“Me and him been fishing these things since we was like 12,” said Mark Winstanley. “We’d go shark fishing in a 14-foot boat. We was so crazy.”
They’d caught a couple of hammerheads on Saturday, but since those aren’t a sanctioned rodeo category, they didn’t keep them. “We released them alive, which is good,” he said.
This tiger shark had been foul-hooked and that made for a challenging fight lasting more than an hour and a half, Mark Winstanley said.
Another substantial shark, a bull shark weighing a hair under 300 pounds, arrived by pickup. James Mullek-Russell of the GSPS Marine team said it had more than an hour to land the shark, he said.
“It’s a fun rodeo,” he said, “but it’s tough. There’s good competition out there this year.”
After years in which sharks were excluded from competition, the Rodeo reopened categories for tiger sharks and bull sharks in 2022.
Rodeo officials said they had worked closely with leading marine scientists to ensure that the competition was “ecologically sound,” and that extensive data would be collected from the specimens brought in.
Sunday evening, several hours after the close of competition, the leaderboard at adsfr.com showed the following results for sharks:
Tiger Shark:
1. Brett Rutledge, 1019 pounds
2. Eric Van Driessche, 656.4 pounds
3. Cody Crumbley, 601.5 pounds
Bull Shark:
1. Conner Blake, 354 pounds
2. Chris Phelps, 330.5 pounds
3. Nicholas Jordan, 307 pounds
Related: Sharks, a Shipp and Cousin Eddie: What we saw at the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo