There were gunshots and blood as Rodney Atkins and his son Elijah had a frightening encounter with a 7-foot bull shark, a known maneater, at night off the Florida coast. Rodney tells his adrenaline-fueled story to Y108′s Jimmy and Monty.

Rodney and Elijah joined a guide on a nighttime fishing expedition in the Gulf of Mexico in late spring of this year. At the most, father and son hoped to catch a yard-long fish.

“We were fishing maybe 200 yards from the shore”, remembers Rodney, “and we caught a 7 and a half foot, 400 pound bull shark.”

“I wound up fighting this thing for about two hours.” When the giant predator finally surfaced into the beam of a search light? “Crazy, it was crazy.” Rodney admits.“It was bigger than Shaquille O’Neal, man, it was a monster.”

Rodney found it hard to keep his cool. “The guide’s talking about how, y’know, ‘This is a killer shark, this is a real man-eating shark’… ‘Oh, my God’ and he pulls out a .22 pistol and starts firing, and blood squirtin’ up in the water, I’m goin’ ‘Oh, my God, what are we doin’ here?’”

There are no photos, and no trophy from their epic struggle.“It was a trip, but I’ll never forget it, and I don’t think Elijah will.”

Hear Rodney tell the story!