First the details and then to the arrrgh of the story. We fished the long 13' rods and the salmon rods from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. It was looking pretty good, the waves were medium sized, the sky was slightly overcast, not too windy and it was the top of a rising tide.

As I'm baiting up the second long rod, the clicker on the other goes ZZZZZZZZZ! Fish on! This fish is taking out line like an express train! By the time the rod is out of the rod holder, there's maybe 50 yards left on the spool. Luckily the fish turns toward me and I gain some ground. He takes off and as the fish glides wherever it pleases I'm thinking that this fish is either a big ray, a humongous whale halibut or a large shark. The line cuts swiftly though the water as the fish heads north. It shakes it's head, okay we're now thinking whale halibut or big shark. There's only a 14lb fluorocarbon trace and I'm starting to wonder whether the line will hold. With a 3/0 circle hook on the other end, I've just got to hope that the hook is in the corner of the fish's mouth to keep the line away from the teeth.

As the fish heads back south, another angry head shake. This fish is getting ornery! It's give and take for a while but closer to shore, the fish glides through the side of a wave and I get a glimpse of a leopard. Shark on! The fish battles but as it loses strength its magnificent and powerful stroke wanes. Closer to shore we see that the leopard shark is between 5 to 6 feet in length! Oh man, how do we land it? Before I could hand the rod off to my girlfriend so I could grab it by the tail, the shark shakes his head one more time as to say goodbye and takes off into deeper water. Arrrgh! He got away. Well, we would have released him anyway but I wanted to weigh the fish to record my own personal record big fish from shore.

By the way, we also caught a nice 2 lb corbina for dinner, plus a yellowfin croaker and two barred perch which were released. The shark was caught on salt cured yellowfin croaker and the rest were caught on bloodworms. What a rush, we'll get em next time...