[Garden&Gun] It’s not for nothing that people call Captain Chip Michalove of Outcast Sport Fishing in Hilton Head, South Carolina, the shark whisperer—he catches great white sharks to tag them for scientists and was the first person in the state of South Carolina to do so. But the gathering of huge great whites he saw feeding on a whale carcass off Myrtle Beach last Thursday tops anything he’s experienced yet. "I didn’t want to leave," he says. "If the weather had allowed, I would have stayed out there for days."
Unfortunately, the whale was a North Atlantic right whale—the most endangered whale in the world—that had died after becoming entangled in fishing gear. But for the great whites, listed as a vulnerable species themselves, it was a welcome opportunity. "By looking at the currents and the wind, we were able to find the whale, and for forty-five minutes we didn’t see a thing," Michalove recalls. "Then they showed up, and it was a show." |