Two Quebec ice fishers hook shark in Saguenay fjord

Two Quebec amateur fishers hooked the catch of a lifetime when they snagged a shark in the Saguenay Fjord earlier this winter.

Doris Boudreault and her husband Alain Gagnon have caught hundreds of large fish in the fjord but never one as big as the Greenland shark they hooked in early February.

The deep water shark, rarely seen in the Saguenay, measured2.8 metresand weighed more than225 kilograms. Boudreault and Gagnon were fishing through a 10-centimetre hole in the ice when they caught the shark.

"At first I thought my line was hooked on something on the bottom," Boudreault told the Journal de Quebec on the weekend. "It was very heavy, but I was able to regain my line. After a few minutes, I asked my husband to take over. I was completely exhausted.

The couple managed to wrangle the shark to the surface but couldn't fit it through their fishing hole at first. When they enlarged the opening, they saw the fin and realized it was a Greenland shark.

The law requires fishers to return caught sharks to the water.

Greenland sharks are deep water creatures most commonly found living in the North Atlantic Ocean around Greenland and Iceland.

They have been caught in the Saguenay Fjord before. In 2006, a Quebec woman caught a 2.7-metre shark, the first caught in the fjord in 11 years.