Kalyn Hoggard | Monday, 4 August 2025
My mom’s parents chose to take vacations in New Smyrna Beach Florida when my mom and dad were kids. Given that my parents have been together since their early teen years, my mother and father have been going down to the space coast together for decades. Fortunately for me, that meant that when I was a wee pup, I got to spend some time in the summer on the beach. New Smyrna can be found between the Kennedy Space Center and Daytona Beach, FL. So if you have a hankering for NASCAR or Space Shuttle launches, then this is the place to be. We fell more on the shuttle launch side of things.
New Smyrna used to be a really cool old Florida town. Good food, good fishing, a small-town vibe, and epic inshore and offshore fishing. I’ll never forget the trolling trips offshore. We had a great captain that we used every year when we were down there, and he had all the right moves. Captain Billy really had a way with people, and he felt more like a close friend than anything else. I can remember being a teenager and thinking I was pretty hot stuff with a rod when Captain Billy took us to a leather and amber jack wreck and told me, “Well if you think you’re tough, then drop a bait down here. These fish are going to swim down like a Volkswagen Beetle sinking to the bottom. Hang on and stay off my gunnel.” He was right. Thirty-to-forty-pound amber jacks swim straight down, and I am not sure that they do this, but if feels like you have to reel them up tail first. They hold that head down and search for the bottom. I still felt tough, but they served me up some humble pie. Rest in Peace Billy. You were a shinning light in the world.
This particular story takes place in the year 2000. I was in 6th or 7th grade at the time. It really wasn’t until the late 90’s that people started becoming increasingly aware of the Black tip shark migration that occurred on the Florida’s Atlantic Coast. I can remember sitting in the living room of our condo with bleach blonde hair, rarely more than swimming trunks, eating a Klondike bar, and seeing the news coverage of the sharks. The news crew would fly helicopters down the beach and video thousands of sharks in big groups making their way to their spawning grounds. The first time I saw this it completely blew my mind. “Dad that is happening right down the beach from us. We need to get some baits out.” Fishing for juvenile sharks, pompano, and whiting was our game. It’s crazy to think about now, but back then I would take any mono I could find, the smallest hook we had, and take a couple of pockets full of squid or shrimp with me down to the water (Mom only put pocket filled shorts in the washing machine once) and chum up a cloud of bait. My goal was to “hand cast” the mono into the group and work my piece of shrimp until I would catch whatever would bite, then I would put them in a tide pool for dad. We would have all sorts of species in those pools swimming around and ready to go on a hook and get launched into the deep with a surf rod. My grandfather used to tell me, “If you keep reaching back that far with the surf rod on your cast, then you are going to eventually hook yourself in the butt.” The memory of that still makes me smile.
We were marginally successful, but the act of working together and accomplishing our goal starting back when I was 2 years old really bonded us together in ways that only something like that could. I’m grateful for those memories.
The summer of the shark as I remember it was just a normal summer in New Symrna. It is worth a read on Wikipedia. I was there when they stopped the surf competition, because so many of the surfers had been bitten in Ponce Inlet in one day. The year before I was out doing my normal gig man. I’ve got my mono, my bait, and a huge cloud of fish on my chum. I had really been picking off some nice whiting that day. So, I’m standing there in the trough, and all of a sudden I see a 7 footer coming into my bait cloud. Well hell man people get bit here all of the time. I dropped everything and ran for the sandbar. “Shark Shark Shark Oh Shit Shark!” For the educated of us, that’s not the move you want to make and that shark absolutely ran as hard as he could through that bait cloud. I don’t blame the shark at all. I made it look like a big group of bait fish was running away from him.
As you might imagine, I made quite the commotion, and my family came to the waters edge running. Well of course I fell down and face planted on the bar making even more of a splash to get the ole Black Tip fired up. So, here I am laying on the sand bar turning around to see the shark and trying to shuffle/run away. It was like a movie the Black Tip was screaming in on me and hit the sandbar with his belly. The shark bottomed out on the bar and was half out of water mouth open chomping at me from 10 feet away. I didn’t actually shit my pants, but if I was the type of person to do that, then I would have. The worst part about it was that my family was going to get an up-close view of me losing a chunk of my calf. Luckily for me he couldn’t get the the splashing he was chasing, and had to really work hard at getting off of that sandbar.
Ironically, the people on the beach were so ignorant to the situation occurring right off the beach that they were mad at me for making a scene when there weren’t any sharks that close to the beach. I would love to hear their apology now given the breaking news about New Symrna. I went as far as stopping the beach patrol and telling the guy, “Hey man I just got chased up by a 7-footer, and it was a really close call.” The beach patrol guy literally told me that there weren’t sharks that size this close to the beach. Ignorance at it’s finest. I’m guessing he was whistling a different tune the next year when shark bite capital of the world got its name during the summer of the shark.
I still love the black tip shark. The fish didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve been fortunate enough to actually befriend one the top black tip researchers, and I’m fascinated by the summer migration. If you haven’t ever seen helicopter footage of the migration, then you should check it out. It’s one of my favorite natural events. I assume that due to how close I was to it for so many years.