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So Sunday at four am my alarm sounds and I wake up completely bewildered only to quickly realize its because were sharking! Still excited from gathering gear only four hours before anticipating the first trip of the year where hopefully we get something over three feet ( last few have been short shorts -2' sadly ) up I get to bring the two shark rods and other gear out to my buddies truck and load up the yak. Of course somehow we get on the road late we get to the osv area late and taking air out of the times seems like its taking forever even with three people! Finally on the beach and prepping shark rods at 545 to the quickly rising sun and I'm getting more discouraged by the second. " were missing our window " I say to myself boy was I wrong. Out go two baits ten minutes later one big bluefiah chunck on a 14/0 circle and a whole croaker caught less than 12hrs before trip on a big 11/0 j hook and out I go to a beautiful sunrise drop the bluefish bait short maybe 250-300 on a Penn 309 and standup rod combo the second bait for a farther ( more line on reel ) drop the croaker at maybe 500 yds in 21' of water after the last bar on a tld20/ Penn slammer combo and paddle back to shore. After a few minutes we set up the other five normal surf rods we brought and get them all out and the waiting game begins. 630 one small rod goes off and its a little bait stealing blue or small shark whole spot bitten clean in half. Typical, just missed the hook. Baited back up and heaved her back out ( our spread for the day was shark rods one and two set up to the right of camp downwind so lines wouldn't tangle in the longer lines with current and wind and set up five rods to the left of said shark rods) (the rod we just re-baited was as far left from the shark rods as possible) and somehow get to the topic of the shark rods ( everytime we do this one reel will start screaming) so were talking sharks for a minute and what happened ?! .... You guessed it! My tld starts screaming at me! I'm well over 200 yds away from this rod at this point and after the initial holy shit I can't believe it happened again I get into gear and start sprintingto the rod before i lose all my line to this beast and as soon as I get to it the reel stops. Wtf. So I leave it in the spike and wait a minute. Nothing. Shit! Set drag and walk backwards to the dunes a hundred yards trying to feel any pressure. Walk rod back to beach while collecting line and set the clicker again and instantly she screams again! This time I'm driving it home I tell myself. set her in gear and drag on full and Sprint to the dined to set the j hook I get almost halfway there before I feel the pull of the shark on my line. I stop and adjust and gather some line while walking back to the surf. This process repeats itself another 20 or so times with constant pressure on the fish with full drag but with only 30lb mainline I had to be careful. Finally get her close enough to see it and finally my wished about a shark over three very were true! Spend another ten or so minutes getting her in from the wash and hand my buddy the rod and told him to put on the clicker and back the drag off. He didn't do this.. instantly my mainline breaks at my 450lb crane swivel and I dive to catch the 250lb mono leader and somehow HP ahold of it right as soon as a wave came in and got lucky enough to use that wave to get the shark in and get a tail rope around it. Tail rope on I clipped the leader so only steel trace was left and got her in for a few quick pictures. Removed the hook and got my leader back and proceeded to drag her back in, boy was she heavy! If waves weren't coming in it would've taken two people to drag her back to deep enough water. After all was said and done we had caught and successfully released a dusky shark that was longer than my armspan (6') from from to nose. Took about half an hour on the fight and I couldn't have dome it by myself the boys clearec all the lines and took control with me quick. This is secondly a team fishery for sure. Every man is important! If anybody is ever down in oc and interested in doing any of this fishing gimme a holler! This will most likely be my last report on this subject due to its sensitive nature ( people here don't like to know there's sharks close to the vacationing kiddos) awesome time with a good group of gots nonetheless. A smaller size sand tiger was landed one camp north of us by some fellas doing the same thing as us.