CT man catches 8-ft shark while paddle boarding in LI Sound

A Connecticut man caught an 8-foot shark while paddleboarding in the Long Island Sound.

Eddie Carroll, 30, of Northford, was participating in the Greatest Bluefish Tournament on Earth when he snagged a 8-foot female sandbar shark on Aug. 27.

It was the second day of the tournament when Carroll caught the fish, also called a brown shark, that was just a few feet shorter than his 12-foot paddleboard.

He had caught a much smaller fish the first day of the tournament and returned the second day hoping to bring in a prize winner.

“I’m hooked into the biggest thing I’ve ever had on the line,” Carroll can be heard saying in a video he filmed.

His fishing pole was sharply bent as he struggled to rein in the beast.

“I’ve got a glimpse of it, I think it’s a giant shark,” he said in the video.

Seconds later, the shark surfaces alongside his board, calmly swimming alongside it.

“That’s f–king crazy,” Carroll said.

Carroll started his journey at Middle Beach Road in Madison, Connecticut, around 8 a.m., where he caught porgy as bait to help track larger fish, according to New Haven Register.

After he dropped a small anchor off his board, the shark quickly took to his line.

“I knew it was something really big,” he told the Register.

The shark pulled Carroll out farther, near Faulkner Island.

The shark continued to pull him around for an hour before the 30-year-old realized he had not caught a bluefish.

After catching a glimpse of the animal, he realized he was being tugged along by a shark.

He eventually cut the line and let the shark go off on its own.

The frequent fisher has caught smaller sharks before, like dogfish, but has never caught a shark as big as the brown shark.

“They don’t have nearly the girth or power that the brown shark had. It was pretty incredible to feel the power of the brown shark,” he told the local outlet.

The brown shark is one of the largest breeds of sharks that can be found in the Long Island Sound.