Dedicated angler catches record-breaking shark - weighing a whopping 89 STONE

Joel Abrahamsson, 33, could not believe his eyes when he reeled in the huge 15-foot Greenland shark, following hours of practice and a final 90-minute struggle.

He built up his strength for the record attempt by lifting rocks and reeling in sunken blocks of cement weighing 60 pounds.

When the big day arrived, the builder used eight pounds of coalfish as bait, which took 25 minutes to lower to depths of 1,600ft from his kayak.

It then took him an hour-and-a-half to reel in the whopper, which is thought to be 200 years old and weighs the same as an adult polar bear.

The incredible catch took place near the island of Andoria, off Norway.

Mr Abrahamsson, from Gothenburg, Sweden, said: "I knew there were fish of this size in Norway and that was all I needed to know to become obsessed with hooking one from a kayak.

"They're almost like dinosaurs. We know they exist but very few people get to see them and it's always been a dream of mine to see a living Greenland shark.

"I prefer to go after big fish from a kayak to prove it's possible.

"I've been fishing all my life but there was no adventure in it anymore, so I started kayak fishing about five years ago because I wanted to be scared - and I was with this one.

"It was too difficult and too heavy at times and I had to just let go of the rod and hold on to the kayak to stop myself falling out."

To give him the extra power needed to reel in the 1,247 pound shark, Mr Abrahamsson strapped himself into a harness that was attached to his rod.

This meant if the shark had overpowered him, he could have been pulled into the freezing waters.

"The fighting harness was almost strangling my stomach and I was left bruised from that," he said.

"The water was really clear and I could see the shark about 50ft under the kayak and that's when I got really scared.

"I just saw this big shadow under me, flapping with its tail. The feeling I got then was a feeling of both total fear and amazement.

"That was about as heavy a fish as I ever want to fight from my kayak."

The monster catch is a world record for a fish caught on rod and reel from a kayak, although the title is unofficial because it was not recorded on a certified scale.

To weigh a fish on a scale would require killing it, but the Greenland shark is a protected species and cannot be commercially fished.

The deadly shark had to be measured and its weight calculated using a recognised formula by researchers in a support boat.

However, this is not the first time that Mr Abrahamsson has smashed the unofficial record.

The previous accomplishment was set by him in 2007, when he caught a 500 pound salmon shark from a kayak in Alaska.

Greenland sharks are slow-moving creatures that live in the north Atlantic - around Canada, Greenland and Norway.

Their diet consists of other fish, including smaller sharks and large cod, but they have even been known to eat polar bears, horses and reindeer.

They have very little interaction with humans because they live in cold, deep water.