This fish story does have teeth

Lured by a salmon, a great white shark pulls anglers’ boat around San Francisco Bay.

Every morning for 10 years, Joey Gamez has hopped on a boat to take customers of his Golden State Sportfishing business on a San Francisco Bay excursion, a hobby-turned-business for the 42-year-old.

On Saturday, he and a group of men were hunting for sevengill sharks, also known as cow sharks, off Alcatraz Island when they made a surprising catch, Gamez said in an interview Monday morning.

The longtime fisherman documented the experience in an expletive-filled Facebook video Saturday, seen more than 40,000 times, with the backdrop of Alcatraz below hazy skies.

Hours into the excursion, the men felt a strong tug at one of their lines, which was baited with a salmon carcass. It was unusual, Gamez said; he normally doesn’t have to pull out his boat’s anchor and follow a fish.

But the men weren’t about to lose a potentially enormous catch, he said. Two miles out from their starting point, the men took turns for more than 30 minutes trying to reel in the enormous fish.

The creature had a powerful pull unlike any Gamez had experienced, he said. Even before they knew what it was, the men marveled at its greatness. Some joked it was a dolphin. Others guessed it was a fish at least 10 feet long.

“We’re just drifting,” Gamez said in the Facebook video, narrating the experience as multiple men struggled to reel in the fish. “It’s taking us everywhere. First time I’ve had to pull an anchor on a shark. I hope it’s a shark.”

It was definitely a shark, but not the kind he was expecting. “What is that?” someone can be heard asking in the video as they reel the creature to the surface. “That’s a … great white!”

Gamez filmed the men as they pulled the massive black-eyed, white-bellied shark toward their boat. Its jaw was hooked on the line, and the salmon carcass floated in its teeth.

“We gotta let it go,” Gamez told his customers before speaking to viewers. “We just caught a great white, here in the Bay.”

The men cut the line and the shark swam away immediately, Gamez said.