A 1,200-Pound Great White Shark Was Caught on a Florida Beach After Hour-Long Fight
Two anglers stood on a quiet stretch of Navarre Beach in the dead of a Florida winter night, waiting in the dark beside a severed tuna head the size of a toddler. Hours passed with nothing.
Then, at 8 a.m., something massive hit the line — and the fight that followed, captured on video and capped by an aerial reveal, has now been watched more than 1.2 million times on YouTube.
An Overnight Stakeout With Oversized Bait
Blaine Kenny and Dylan Wier own Coastal Worldwide shark fishing tours.
They set up their equipment on the sand at Navarre Beach on Santa Rosa Island, a stretch of Gulf Coast shoreline between Pensacola and Destin, Florida, the night before the catch and sat through the darkness.
Their bait choices tell the story of what they were after.
Kenny used the head of an 80-pound yellowfin tuna. Wier used the head of a 150-pound swordfish. Bait that size has one purpose: attracting something enormous.
An Hour-Long Fight Yields Massive Surprise
The moment the bite came, Kenny knew this was different. Whatever was on the end of the line was big, powerful, and heading east fast.
At times, the fish pulled so hard that Kenny and Wier considered chasing it down the beach to keep up.
“This is absolutely nuts dude, he’s screaming east,” Kenny said in the video. “We might have to end up chasing him at some point.”
Kenny fought for nearly one hour. The footage shows him visibly exhausted, muscles straining against a creature he couldn’t see.
Nearly sixty minutes of raw tug-of-war between a man on the sand and something lurking beneath the Gulf.
Through most of it, they had no idea what was on the other end.
“It’s a big, big wintertime shark,” Wier said, trying to narrow it down. “There’s only a few things it can be, a mako, a giant tiger, a white shark or the biggest dusky we’ve ever seen in our lives.”
So they launched a drone.
A 12-Foot Great White Shark Lurking In the Waters
The drone lifted off the beach, buzzed out over the water, and its camera tilted downward toward the line. The bird’s-eye view cut through the surface glare, and the shape beneath became unmistakable.
“Look at that, that’s a white shark!” Wier says in the footage. “That’s a monster, dude, that’s not just any white shark.”
Even for two guys who run shark fishing tours professionally, this was a shock. The raw emotion in Wier’s voice — disbelief, excitement, awe — is what has kept more than a million viewers watching.
It’s one thing to read about a great white shark. Watching two people discover in real time that they’ve hooked one from a beach is something else.
Kenny eventually reeled the shark close enough to shore to unhook and release it. When they finally saw the full animal up close after nearly an hour of blind fighting, the scale was staggering.
According to a Facebook post from Coastal Worldwide, the shark was estimated at more than 1,200 pounds and 12 feet long. That’s roughly the weight of a grand piano.
“This has been the day that Blaine has been dreaming about since he dropped his first bait,” Wier said.
After the hookup and measurements, the shark was released back into the Gulf.
This Wasn’t the Pair’s First Great White
The catch at Navarre Beach wasn’t Coastal Worldwide’s first encounter with the species. The team previously caught an 11-foot great white in March 2023 — 10 months earlier — off Orange Beach, Alabama.
That earlier catch drew attention from scientists. Dr. Marcus Drymon of Mississippi State University described just how unusual it was in an interview with WALA.
“This is a very rare event and maybe, if those guys continue to fish from the beach for the next several years and never catch another one like it,” Drymon said of the Alabama catch, adding the species is uncommon in this part of the world and especially from the beach.
Less than a year later, Kenny and Wier were standing on another Gulf Coast beach, watching drone footage of a white shark even bigger than the last one.
The Full Video Keeps Racking Up Views
The full footage was shared on YouTube on Jan. 31, 2024, and has since passed 1.2 million views. It captures the entire saga: the initial bite, the exhausting fight, the drone reveal, and the up-close release.
The original jaw-dropping catch drew widespread coverage. An overnight stakeout on a deserted winter beach, a mystery creature ripping line for close to an hour, an angler refusing to quit, and then the moment a drone rises over the water and delivers the answer.
That’s a great white shark.
More than 1.2 million people have already watched it happen.
Production of this article included the use of AI. It was reviewed and edited by a team of content specialists.
