An amateur fisherman from Chania caught a huge basking shark. Christos Mantinakis, who had gone fishing off Gramvousa with his inflatable boat, was surprised to find that something big had been caught on his hook.

It took two hours with his friend, who had gone fishing together until they managed to raise their prey to the surface. When the two friends saw that it was a shark, the basking shark was already exhausted as it had more than 20 hooks and pieces of stainless steel in its mouth and the two fishermen, who are aware that the population of this species is dangerously declining, told ERT that the fish would not have survived even if they cut the line were minimal.

In fact, two years ago, Christos Mantinakis had caught a shark again in the waters of Chania but released him. The shark was caught at a depth of 500 meters with hooks and weighed about 200 kg, while in the specific area off Gramvousa in the past other sharks have also been caught.

The basking shark is the second-largest living shark and fish, after the whale shark, and one of three plankton-eating shark species, along with the whale shark and megamouth shark.