Fisherman jumps into ocean with 10-foot great white off Hilton Head after line snags
Hilton Head charter captain Chip Michalove said his latest shark tagging expedition started out like many of them do, with near freezing temperatures and a long wait to see a great white.
Beyond that, though, nothing about last Thursday was typical.
After a day on the water, about 2 p.m., a shark took the bait.
“As many great white sharks as I’ve seen, the adrenaline rush, there’s just nothing that compares to it,” said Michalove, known locally as the great white shark whisperer because of his expertise at finding and tagging sharks off Hilton Head for scientific research.
While Michalove and his boat mates were reeling the shark in, the animal turned and charged their boat.
“It went under the middle of the hull, and the line snagged on a barnacle,” Michalove explained. He tried to free the line, but nothing worked, so he was faced with a difficult choice.
“If the line breaks, the fish is swimming away with quite a lot of gear hanging from him,” the captain said. “I needed somebody to get in the water and free this thing.”
Lifetime dream
Ben Friedman, who recently moved to Tampa, Florida, from St. Louis, said he didn’t hesitate to jump into the ocean, despite the risks. The 30-year-old, who hosts a soon-to-be debuted outdoor show online, said he has been obsessed with sharks since he was a child and waited for years to go on a shark expedition with Michalove.
“There was nothing in the world that I wasn’t going to do,” Friedman said about his split-second reaction. “I just jumped in as quick as I could.”
Friedman said he grew up fishing and had experience untangling line from piers, bridge pilings and crab traps. He knew what to do.
But he also knew what the angry shark was capable of if something about their plan went wrong.
Once in the frigid February water, he glanced in the direction of the shark but focused on the line.
“By the time that I got that unhooked, I could have beaten Michael Phelps,” Friedman said, comparing his speed swimming to get back into the boat to the legendary Olympic medalist. “I’ve never moved faster.”
Michalove called the experience both physically and mentally exhausting. He was on high alert with shark they’d caught but also was keeping his eyes out for other sharks that might be in the area.
A tag and a name
Once the line was freed, the crew reeled the female shark close to the side of the boat, took her measurements — 10 feet, 8 inches long and about 750 pounds — and put satellite tags on her. Michalove noted some scratches on the left side of her face that told him she had been chasing seals.
“When all the tagging process was over, we celebrated like we won the lottery and called it a day,” he said. Four days later, he felt like he was still recovering.
Michalove, who operates Outcast Sport Fishing on Hilton Head, has a permit to catch, tag and release white sharks, a federally protected species, so they can be tracked by scientists with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
Before Michalove started catching white sharks off the Lowcountry in January 2014, there was no data about them farther south than New York. Since then, he’s tagged dozens, helping scientists to understand more about the species and its winter migration patterns.
The public can watch the sharks’ movements via the Sharktivity app from the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.
Michalove takes every precaution possible to make sure the sharks are not harmed during the tagging process. He also keeps his catching techniques and his location secret so that information isn’t easily used by others to harm the species.
“I feel like the weight is on my shoulders to make sure these fish aren’t accidentally killed,” he said.
One of the perks of tagging the sharks is that Michalove gets to name them. Even though this shark is a female, Michalove says it will be named for an avid Hilton Head fisherman, Bob Hughes, who died in 2021. The shark will be named Bob-O, Hughes’ nickname and the name of his boat.
Friedman said the experience made him feel a special connection to the shark.
“It was easily the best day of my life,” he said. “... It’s just surreal.”
Mystery boat
Besides searching for a great white shark, Michalove had one other purpose — to launch a small, handmade sailboat out to sea.
The blue-and-green boat, made of wood, had washed up near Tower Beach in Sea Pines in July and was found by a member of the Sea Turtle Patrol Hilton Head Island. Volunteers with the patrol monitor the island’s beaches during nesting season.
The only thing written on the boat was “In loving memory” and “1948-2020.” There was no name or location.
After a post on the patrol’s Facebook page, a man came forward and said he had found the boat on Tybee Island earlier in the month and sent it back out to sea with help from a naturalist on the island. The boat’s story was detailed in Garden and Gun magazine.
The Hilton Head patrol’s director Amber Kuehn held onto the boat for a while to see if anyone would claim it. She told The Island Packet that she didn’t open the boat to confirm the small vessel contained someone’s ashes but thought it was a plausible conclusion.
She asked Michalove to bring the boat back out to sea, and he said he was honored to be a part of the boat’s story.
“We said a prayer, and we placed the boat in the water and told this person we loved them, and we pushed it off,” he said. “I don’t know where this little boat will end up next.”
This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
