The One That Didn’t Get Away

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 13, 1964, vacationers crowded the beach at Cherry Grove, just north of Myrtle Beach. Out at the end of the pier, a bricklayer named Walter Maxwell and his shark-fishing friends were watching their lines.

Around 2 p.m., Maxwell’s big reel began to click. A tiger shark had taken the bait. For an hour it made run after run while Maxwell pumped and reeled, until finally the shark was alongside the pier. His buddy Jim Michie leaned over the railing and drove a gaff into its mouth. Then a wave fell, the gaff was torn from Michie’s hands, and the shark swam free. Eyewitnesses swore it was at least 18 feet long and might have topped 2,000 pounds.
Most men would have gone home. Maxwell came back the next day.

On Sunday he hooked another monster. Spectators gasped as it leaped from the water some 500 feet out, then turned and ran down the beach toward Florida. The fight dragged on for more than four hours. When the shark finally rolled beneath the pier, Maxwell got a gaff into its mouth. Then he jumped down to the sand, hauled it into the shore break, and lassoed its head and tail.

On the scales, the tiger shark weighed 1,780 pounds. Maxwell had landed it with no boat, no fighting chair, and no captain. It is still listed as tied for the all-tackle world record, sharing that title with a shark caught off Ulladulla, Australia, in 2004.

Michie’s photograph of Maxwell and the crowd became the pier’s best-selling postcard. Copies still hang in its tackle shop today. After the piers later banned shark fishing, Maxwell moved north to North Carolina. In 1966 he pulled a 1,150-pound tiger shark from Yaupon Beach Pier, setting another state record.