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Just Angling for August 5th, 2004

 

By Donald Millus

 

                        Jim Michie and  Monster Sharks Remembered

 

            Forty years ago this past June, a young man from Florence, South Carolina, accomplished what no one else had done before or since.  Jim Michie gaffed two world record tiger sharks, total weight some two tons, from Cherry Grove Pier in North Myrtle Beach. Subsequently he became an archeologist and a distinguished member of the Coastal Carolina University faculty, but his contribution to angling history will never be matched.

 

            Michie passed away on a recent Sunday, the day of the week on which he helped to make Myrtle Beach famous.

 

            Michie was a neighbor of mine in Conway in his last years.  With a scientist’s love of details and facts he filled me in on the story of those two world record fish battled to the pier by Walter Maxwell, a North Carolina stone mason who had never caught a shark before. With a southerner’s love of a good story, Michie added color and humor to the story of the world record fish.

 

            Maxwell was determined to catch a monster shark and he had the tackle to do it.  Michie, who had fished for sharks from Gulf of Mexico piers, knew what all good Gulf fishermen knew: Maxwell had to have not only a good rod, which Michie built from a Shakespeare blank, but the right color of winding thread on his rod.   Michie also crafted a leather harness and socket for fighting a monster fish. A16/0 Penn Senator reel filled with 130-pound test linen line, plus wire leader and 14/0 hook completed the tackle.

 

            One of Michie’s  favorite stories was how someone would be showing off a five or ten pound mackerel on a pier and how he would ask the successful angler to donate it as shark bait.  On the weekend in June, the bait was a dead ray.  Sharks,   Michie pointed out, were not interested in run-over collie pups no matter what the poet James Dickey said in “The Sharks Parlor.”

 

            Michie was a stage manager that day, helping bait the hook—about the size of a fist—and running the baits away from the pier with a small motorboat.  The first shark—“the Saturday Shark” as he called it, was at least a third bigger than “the Sunday shark” which was officially weighed in at 1,780 pounds.  Michie gaffed the first shark  after a one-hour battle—too short, the shark was still “green”—and the hook pulled out. Not even the strong arms of a young man could hold a shark weighing more than a ton as it rose and fell in the  swell from offshore.  It swam out to sea with the gaff hook in it  and a vaulter’s pole sticking out of the water like a periscope.

 

            Maxwell hooked his world record fish on Sunday and battled it for five and a half hours, mostly sitting on a hard wooden bench.  Michie gaffed the fish with a flying gaff, a gaff hook attached to a rope.  The  pole would pull loose after the gaff was in the fish and the shark was as good as boated, except it had to be towed to the beach.  It had to be trucked to Loris the next day and weighed on a truck scale, but it was an International Game Fish Association world record.

 

            According to Michie, Maxwell became an instant celebrity and shark expert.  “He would feel the line of an angler who was battling a shark and announce its species and size,” Michie told me with a chuckle  I like to think that  the late Walter Maxwell and my  neighbor and colleague are now  swapping shark stories with Ernest Hemingway, Zane Gray, and perhaps even James Dickey.

 

            After a memorial service this past Monday, another one of my neighbors, author Susan McMillan, showed me a newspaper picture of Jim Michie with a ten-foot, 300-pound shark caught off Cherry Grove pier. The caption says that  Michie “strikes the typical heroic pose.” I think he just looks like a happy young man, but readers can judge for themselves. As for the rest of us mortals, we will have to be content to fish for sharks from a boat because Horry County has banned shark fishing from its beaches and piers.  No more young heroes like Jim Michie.

 

            (Editor’s Note: The complete story of  the world record tiger shark as it appeared in Outdoor Life may be found in Fishing the Southeast Coast, available in Horry County  libraries and at Coastal Carolina University. A photo of the fish, taken by Michie, may also be found in Wading South, both books by our “Just Angling” author.)

 

 

 

Caption For Photo:

 

Jim Michie himself caught this 300-plus pound shark from Cherry Grove Pier in the mid-1960’s. (Photo courtesy of The State and  Susan McMillan)