Some find it thrilling. Other NYC commercial real estate execs hit the open water to relax. Here are a few fishing stories to make you wish for spring (unless you’re into ice fishing, in which case, just go outside and lift a manhole cover).
Years ago, Invesco's Todd Bassen (the tall guy in the back) and some of his former RREEF co-workers headed to a company meeting in Miami’s South Beach a few days early. The meeting started at night, so the day of, they chartered a deep-sea fishing boat and headed two miles off shore. That’s where Todd hooked a 468-pound, 10-foot-plus mako shark. It was the largest mako caught in South Florida in more than 20 years and got Todd in the Miami Herald that Super Bowl Sunday.
Todd tells us he catches and releases nowadays. He has tremendous respect for sharks, like this one he snapped while bull shark diving sans cage/chainmail suit three weeks ago at Mexico’s Playa Del Carmen. The record-setting mako shark at top lives in Todd’s garage because his wife won’t allow it in the house—and it wouldn’t fit anyway. At his old house, though, it hung in the basement, the perfect prop for his kids to scare their friends.
Here’s NOI Strategies executive director Glenn Murray last month in Biscayne, Fla., with his largest bonefish ever, estimated at 30 inches and 10 or 11 pounds. The water started out dead flat, with fish pushing through the cove all morning, he says. Then, look out! “This bad boy chased me down on the retrieve like nothing I have ever seen,” he says. It nearly spooled him on the first run, but they had two more big runs for a 10-minute fight. It was an awesome adrenaline rush, he tells us.
Vornado’s Matt McAvoy needed some alone time during a February 2011 family vacation to Atlantis Paradise Island, which he’s dubbed the Disney World of the Bahamas for attractions like the Mayan temple water slide. So he set sail south of Nassau. While the area isn’t known as a fishing destination, he had acres of flats to himself and had a fantastic day until his last 20 minutes, when he hooked and then lost this guy’s big brother.
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