Sunday Favorites: The Sharkman of Longbeach

A.M Holbrook helps bring in a 20-foot long great white shark Dec. 24, 1937.

LONGBOAT KEY-- A.M. Holbrook tossed a couple of trash fish in the crystal clear waters of the Sarasota Bay and then decided to jump in himself. The cool water immediately soothed his suntanned skin and he closed his eyes while floating on the surface, enjoying the rays of sunlight that warmed his face.

He was so relaxed, he could have fallen asleep, but he suddenly felt something very big brush against his body underwater.  Quickly, he stood up on the grassy bottom just as a large shark swam away.

He slowly backed out of the water as more sharks arrived, targeting the discarded fish that still bobbed on the surface.

According to Holbrook, the sharks could have “bitten him in half as easy as you’d cut a piece of meat with a clever.”

However, they never made any attempt to attack him, even when he remained motionless in the water, too scared to move.

That was the day Holbrook gained a new respect for the creatures he’d been hunting for the last few years. After that, he found any predatory reference to sharks “dim and fallacious.”

Holbrook, a former mechanical engineer based in Maine, moved to Longbeach Village in 1932.  His career building power plants had taken him all over the world, but the prosperous profession came to a halt during the Great Depression. Holbrook was stuck at a crossroads and forced to begin a new career in the latter half of his life.  

Not knowing what to do, he suddenly had an idea for a newfound livelihood. He thought back to the days he’d spent in Florida while building two power plants. During his stay, he tried his hand at shark fishing for the thrill of he sport. Being well aware of the value of sharks, he decided he would try to make a living by catching them and selling their carcasses for medicinal and manufacturing purposes.

At the time, sharkskin was in demand as it could be made into shoes, bags, belts and other leather articles. Shark livers contained special oils that were extracted and used for therapeutic solvents and vitamins. The fins of the shark were shipped to Chinatown. There, they were considered a great delicacy and made into gelatin for soups and other dishes.

Edgar Green poses with his great white shark on Dec. 24, 1937.

While Holbrook had grown up fishing, it took him a while to get the hang of catching sharks. Fishing in the Gulf was a much different experience.

At first, he used a 2,000-foot rope anchored with chains and large hooks of meat. But his contraption was unsuccessful. He received ridicule from the local commercial fishermen when the rope broke and the hooks bent from the weight of the huge sharks.

However, Holbrook did not give up. He kept improving his apparatus with better hooks and line. In three years, he had caught over 3,000 sharks, all more than 6 feet long and of all different varieties. He created a "shark factory" in at Savarese Bayou on the lee side of Longboat Key. He was making a comfortable living and was able to hire some help to tend the fixed lines anchored offshore.

On one occasion, Holbrook's coworker Edgar Green caught a great white shark about 6 miles west of Longboat Key Pass. It was Christmas Eve, and a northeasterly wind had created windy, dark weather and rough seas. However, Green knew leaving the sharks hooked on the fixed line he and Holbrook maintained would mean certain death for most of them. So, he went out to check on them in their 28-foot wooden boat. 

Green worked to pull up the lines, but one wouldn't budge. At first he thought it was a snag but then little by little, he began pulling up the biggest shark he'd ever seen. He battled the great white in for over an hour, wrapping the line around a wooden post at the stern. Slowly, the shark rose to the surface.

It measured 20-feet long, 8 feet wide and weighed over 2,536 pounds. Pulling in the shark, Green said, was the "fight of a lifetime." After he finally managed to get the shark to the boat, and pull it to shore, he was too tired, and the weather too bad to cut it up that evening. So on Christmas morning, a crowd gathered on the beach as Green and Holbrook spent their Christmas butchering the shark. 

Holbrook claimed great whites were the only species known to attack humans. Luckily for locals, this was the only great white they ever caught in the Gulf.

One of the reasons Holbrook thought other species of sharks were harmless to humans was because of what he’d found in their bellies over the years. He always split open the carcass of the sharks he caught to prevent air pockets from keeping them afloat. In all the thousands and thousands of sharks he cut open, he never found any evidence that the fish had attacked a person. Some of the most interesting items inside the guts of the wild beasts included a dishcloth, canvas and an old shoe. Most of the time, he only found pelican feathers, pieces of sea turtle shells and remnants of horseshoe crabs.

While Holbrook was known for the sharks he caught, he also had a deep appreciation for the sea birds that landed on his shoulders as he cleaned. They were so tame, they often came when he called them by name, and it seemed as if he named them all.

For around two decades Holbrook made a comfortable living doing what he loved and greatly contributed to the scientific studies of sharks.

During the late 1950s, Holbrook experienced failing health that eventually confined him to a wheelchair. However, friends and relatives always remember him smiling in his disabled state, especially at the memories of his shark fishing days on Longbeach. 

The information in this article was taken from a 1980 interview conducted by the Manatee County Historical Society. During the interview, Mrs. Gordon Whitney (Laura Colvin Whitney) reads several old, undated newspaper clippings concerning the early pioneers of Longbeach and Longboat Key.

The story of Holbrook was extracted from an article written by Dan F. Prew of the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

Additional information came from a Herald Tribune article by Ron Pretty entitled "A Giant Shark from the Gulf."