Culture / Newsy

Mega Shark Caught in Surfside by Texas’ Own Fearless Shark Girl: Woman Never Backs Down When Faced With the Big Fin

BY // 07.09.18

Swimmers at Surfside Beach got a real life Shark Week preview like no other. Beach goers got to come face to fin with a whopping blacktip shark, which was hauled onto land by Lauren Biggers — Texan, Crossfit enthusiast and, as she’s come to be known, “Shark Girl.”

It was the reel deal, the successful catch of a massive sharp-toothed, muscle-bound six-to-seven footer.

The feisty fish was safely released back into the water after the battle of woman and beast, and a few clutch photo ops. All in all, it took Biggers a 30-minute tussle at 300 yards out to bring the shark up to shore. Bystander Ayon Dasgupta got the whole thing on video. It was a valiant, and viral, effort.

Biggers, a Conroe native who lives in Austin, went to the Brazoria County beach with her husband, sister and friends for her husband’s birthday. He’s an avid shark fisher, but he didn’t have the best timing this weekend.  After dropping the mullet bait, Biggers’ husband and his friend took the boat out to fish offshore.

“I’d been with them before. But I’d never actually been the one catching,” Biggers tells PaperCity. “I was just hanging out in the water, me, my sister and my friend. I saw one of the lines get a bite, so I got out of the water. We were there by ourselves, we had no choice.

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 “I knew that it had something on it. I figured it was something big. But I did not know it was a shark.”

A sizeable shark might have freaked out some less fearless folk. “I was really happy, I wanted to get a shark,” Biggers says. Once she recognized the telltale black tip of its fin, she yelled for swimmers to get out of the water.

Crossfit Trumps Sharks

Standing on the beach, she felt pretty confident. “As long as it didn’t pull me in the water. Once I got it to shore I didn’t want to get too close to it. All sharks have the potential to attack you,” Biggers notes.

But she was the one on the offensive. It was definitely a day for adrenaline.

“I was just reeling it in. I kind of got hooked on it,” Biggers laughs. “It swam with the current a little ways towards me, that helped me for a little.”

She credits Crossfit with her successful catch. “I hadn’t worked out a long time before I started doing that,” Biggers says. “That shark weighed more than I did.” Full-grown blacktips come in at an impressive 150 pounds on average.

This Shark Girl’s forearms trembled and even got numb, but she never buckled. And she’s got the bruises on her stomach where she was resting the pole to prove it.

A stunned crowd gathered around Shark Girl for the fight, including a man surveying the scene from the balcony of the nearby Seahorse Bar & Grill. A veteran shark fisher, he helped Biggers get the shark off the hook and guided it back to the ocean.

Biggers would do it all again in a heart beat, sore muscles, bruises and all. “I had fun doing it,” she says. That blacktip was the largest her crew had ever caught, her husband included.

“I thought it was really funny that my husband was out on his boat in the water – while I caught a shark and went viral on the Internet,” Biggers laughs.

Don’t worry, Mr. Biggers. There’s always more fish in the sea — if you can catch ’em.

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