There are few fly fishing situations that are as outside the norm as putting a fly in front of a shark and when Captain Gifford Scott of S.C. Flats Fishing sent a text to invite to a couple guide friends and I out on his new boat, we were all in.
I had just received the Bandit 7'10" ten weight from the good folks at Swift Fly Fishing and figured that this would be the perfect trip to see how it would perform. A ten weight is heavy enough for a shark...right? I figured so when I was putting everything together at the truck but once we were in open water with four to six foot long sharks crossing quickly behind the boat, I was second guessing myself.
Without a doubt, Captain Gifford Scott has the shark game figured out in the waters around Charleston. He was all business in setting us up with finding bait for the chum slick and then lining up behind a trawler in hopes of enticing a shark to pull off and snoop around behind our boat for a free meal of a grip of bright chicken feathers tied on a large circle hook.
For the first couple hours we moved from trawler to trawler until Captain Scott thought things were just right. Within minutes several sharks passed quickly behind the boat and I cast my fly out thirty or forty feet behind the boat to let it hang in the current. The intermediate line took the fly several feet beneath the chop and suddenly a shark came from beneath it on the eat and then took off for the horizon. The circle fly took hold and the Bandit suddenly bent over in a half circle and stayed that way for the next hour. The large arbor reel with the drag dialed all the way down still peeled off fly line followed by a couple hundred yards of backing. This was a battle on the fly like I've never experienced.