This story was originally published on Sharkophile.com on July 23, 2017.
“Is that Old Hitler?” the young boy asked me as I was waiting for my luggage at the airport in Fort Myers.
The boy’s mom looked horrified that her son was making Hitler references to strangers in the middle of a busy airport terminal. I just smiled as I lifted up my pant leg to fully reveal the hammerhead shark tattoo that covered most of my right calf.
“It is. What do you know about him?”
“I just learned about him on Shark Week,” he replied giddily.
“That was me on the boat trying to catch him,” I said.
His eyes lit up. “Look mom, he’s the Old Hitler guy,” he proclaimed.
All I could do was smile. Everything was still pretty surreal at this point. The documentary I was a big part of, Monster Hammerhead, had just aired the night before during prime time of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. I was returning from a cross-country flight from Los Angeles after being a guest on Shark After Dark, the shark-themed after-show, where I got to hang out with Danny Trejo and Matt Walsh.
The Sunday 1A feature that I had written for my newspaper about our local shark legend got picked up by the Associated Press and by the time I had landed, it had been republished by over 160 other papers around the country. At one point, the story was simultaneously featured on the main page for the respective websites of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times and USA Today.
To top it off, it was my birthday.
I was just one chapter in the story of Old Hitler, however.
Baitshack Banter
I remember the first time I heard the legend of the massive hammerhead shark. I was only six or seven and hanging out at my grandmother’s bait shop which was located on US 41 on the way out to Boca Grande Pass. The Pass is a small strip of waterway off of Gasparilla Island that connects Charlotte Harbor to the Gulf of Mexico. Several steep underwater ledges, some as deep as 75 feet, pockmark the pass and serve as a cauldron of activity for gigantic marine creatures.
The local fishing captains would often pull in to Bea’s Bait Shack to show off their catches of the day while they replenished their shrimp supply for the next day of fishing. I remember one fisherman blaming Old Hitler for stealing his really big ones. At the time, I thought he was being serious. I was too naive to realize that was the locals go to excuse for losing a fish.
The legend was something that had been passed around bait shops and dive bars for decades. As I wrote in the NDN feature on the origins of the name, Old Hitler:
“Although tales of massive hammerheads have been common up and down the coast since the turn of the 20th century, it wasn’t until World War II that those tales took on near-mythical proportions.
As the war efforts ramped up, German U-boats invaded American water, waging an all-out assault on any and all marine vessels. In 1942 alone, the German submarines recorded 56 attacks on American ships off the coast of Florida, 40 of which ended up on the ocean’s floor. Among them was the Baja California, a freighter carrying a load of military transport vehicles. The freighter was torpedoed and sank 55 miles off the coast of Marco Island.
To combat the invasion, the United States Coast Guard and Navy deployed dirigible blimps to patrol the coast. Merchant mariners and supply vessels, paranoid from the attacks, reported sightings of unidentified watercraft cruising around the major shipping ports. Many of those sightings were attributed to giant hammerhead sharks cruising along the surface.
As commercial fishing became one of the major local industries after the war, encounters with great hammerheads became more and more frequent. Anyone who spent time on the water seemed to have a hammerhead story, and they were just believable enough to be true.”
The first shark I ever caught was a bonnethead on the grass flats of Charlotte Harbor. We called him “Little Hitler.” It would spawn a fascination that continues to this day.
The tales of Old Hitler, the 20-foot plus great hammerhead that supposedly roams the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico between the Boca Grande Pass and Tampa Bay, have been passed down through Florida’s generations. From salty old anglers to recreational fishermen, everyone seemed to have a tale about the legendary beast. Although large sharks of all sizes call Florida’s waters home, no other species carries the mystique of the hammerhead, and with each monster sighting or record catch the legend of Old Hitler grew.
When I became a professional journalist, I used every opportunity I could find to write and report on sharks, especially the ones that called the Gulf of Mexico home. I sort of became the media’s de facto keeper of the legend, a title that had been started with Tampa’s Fox 13 News by longtime sportscaster “Salty” Sol Fleischman. For more than five decades, Fleischman, an avid outdoorsman, reported many of the legend’s most retold details.
From Print to Screen
I chased the legend both on the water and through second-hand accounts for years. I was a bit skeptical when producers from Shark Week approached me about doing a documentary. I had been approached a few years earlier by a production company that was interested in doing a story. I consulted during the preproduction process on the shark’s mythology. That shoot ended in disaster on the first day after a hooked hammerhead was ripped to shreds by bull sharks in the pass. Filming was scrapped after that.
Three years later, a different production company wanted to try again and they wanted me to be a part of it. After several screen tests, they decided to use me in front of the camera as well as using my writing over the years as the backstory for the show’s script. A few weeks later I was on a boat chasing myths. Instead of filming in Boca Grande Pass or Tampa Bay where the legend is based, they used Jupiter as a filming locale because the water was clearer and sending a cameraman in to the water was less hazardous than what it was in the Pass.
We spent a week on the water chasing sharks during the primary shoot for Monster Hammerhead. We used buoys and handlines to bring the sharks on board. Although the show portrayed us as a bunch of fishermen, it was in reality a full scientific expedition. Dr. Greg Stunz and Dr. Matt Ajemian of the Texas A&M University – Corpus Christie, along with Jill Brooks of the Bimini Shark Lab were the other “fishermen” on board. Although the target was hammerheads, we ended up tagging, sampling and releasing 24 sharks different sharks during the mission.
We did end up catching one hammerhead for the trip, which is the one you see in the show. A satellite tracking tag was affixed to its dorsal fin but, for whatever reason, we never heard from it again.
Making of a Myth
There was a lot of backlash from the show, starting with some of the participants for the Bahamas portion of the shoot claiming that the producers were less than truthful about their roles. or the over reliance on questionable scientific procedures such as the sharks with laser beams schtick. There was already some ill-will against Shark Week by some in the scientific community over previous “fake” documentaries that portrayed megalodons, a prehistoric shark, as still being alive. The production company behind Monster Hammerhead were the same ones behind other documentaries like Voodoo Shark, another film about a mythical killer shark, which didn’t help credibility.
Besides the fudging of locations, there were other Hollywood liberties taken on the show. The crusty old guy talking about the “wolf of the sea” was a homeless guy we bribed with a Publix sub to say a few lines. The mysterious prop-biting encounter was staged with an actor from the local theater house. In the climactic scene, we were never actually fighting a shark, just a bucket to simulate drag and the hook was straightened before we ever left the dock. It took five takes for us to hit the deck just right.
I didn’t really have a problem with most of these things. After all, the embellishments and tall tales were what has made the legend of Old Hitler as enduring as it has been through the years. My biggest regret was that the show never got to the heart of what the legend of Old Hitler was all about.
Facts and Fish Tales
Old Hitler was never a single shark — even from the earliest days of the legend. It is more likely a series of sharks that have managed to outgrow their brethren and claim this part of the Gulf of Mexico as their own, a behavior marine biologists refer to as site fidelity. Nearly every major port in Florida has their own version of a legendary hammer. The legend of the Harbormaster –which was also featured as part of the storyline — originated around Jacksonville. In Key West, there is the Mightiest Mother Fucker in the Ocean, Mighty Mo for short.
Unfortunately, the historical aspect was delegated to a 30-second montage using fake newspaper headlines. This is a shark with long-running cultural significance and yet the film crew never dipped a toe in the water where the actual legend took place. Instead of investigating why these massive sharks stick around long enough to become part of the folklore, we got staged equipment malfunctions and dramatic music.
The next year, Discovery brass cracked down on the sensationalized programming to focus on the science of sharks. I wish they had started a year earlier.
In the end though, it was just one more chapter in a story that has spanned well over 100 years. It’s a story that grows every time a trophy fish is lost to the depths or shaky cell phone footage pops up. Who knows, maybe that young boy in the airport will be the one to finally catch Old Hitler again.
What a story that would make.
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There will always be stories to tell about these fascinating fish, and not just about Old Hitler. I guess that is was why I decided to start this site, Sharkophile, to continue to tell those stories and why I chose the first day of Shark Week to serve as the official launch for the site. If this is your first time here, welcome, and if you haven’t already, please like us on Twitter and Facebook.