Elasmobranchitis

Elasmobranchs, of course, are the family of fishes that include sharks and rays.

In July of last year, I came down with a bad case of elasmobranchitis. It actually kept me out of work for a few days....

There's something slightly incongruous about setting out to go bay fishing with medium-heavy rods and Garcia 7000s ... but only if you're not "sharking."

Word around town in the weeks leading up to my infection with the dreaded malady was that big sharks were hungry in the Lydia Ann Channel and on the west side of Mud Island in Aransas Bay. Happened about the same time last year, too.

After an earlier trip with my brother in which two big fish got off -- leaving frayed leader behind them -- I set out after work with high hopes. My cousin Bob and I missed two fish -- one was on for maybe 30 seconds.

After picking up and moving to start another drift, we decided to use the odds and ends of what bait we had left for chum. Over the side it went, creating a nice slick With half a horse mullet on one line and a whole one on the other, we watched the rod tips twitch as gafftops mouthed the bait.

Then, just as it was getting dark and we were thinking about winding it up, the drag on the bow rod started singing! Something had taken the whole mullet.

About 20 minutes later, we saw the fish for the first time ... SHARK!

And suddenly we remembered all the things we didn't bring: flashlight, gloves to handle the wire, a bigger gaff .... After about 30 minutes, we finally got a 66-inch bull shark into the boat.

Unofficial weight as of making it back to the dock was a hair over 85 pounds.

The last time I caught a shark approaching that size, I was fishing for tuna off Venice, La. A school of hungry duskys kept gulping our bait ...at around 60 pounds apiece, they were sporty, but after a while catching sharks -- while hunting tuna -- grows monotonous.

So here are my thoughts on bull sharks in Aransas Bay ... it's kind of cool to go big game fishing where I'm usually plugging for trout; and ... it's kind of, uh, thought-provoking to pull something that big and with that many really pointy teeth out of water where I'm usually ... plugging for trout.