Greg Dubrule didn’t expect to prepare shark for dinner Wednesday night.

Dubrule, owner and captain of Blackhawk Sport Fishing out of Niantic, was with a group of customers on an expedition Wednesday afternoon when they got ahold of a 355-pound thresher shark off Fishers Island.

Dubrule and his mates, Mike Salkauskas and Brett Ellis, out on a typical sea bass and porgy trip, knew one another from Yale New Haven Hospital.

“On the way in I said, ‘Let’s just try it, guys. I’ll throw a couple of chum buckets over,’” Dubrule said of a final-hour effort to nab a shark. “Sometimes you go shark fishing, and it’s the most boring thing in the world — you’re there six hours, you don’t get a bite.” He told his customers not to get discouraged, but to ‘“sit back, have a nice drink, and we’ll see what happens. We’ll give it an hour.’”

Forty-five minutes later, “Bang, there goes the rod,” Dubrule said. “It pulled like hell. Catching a big shark like that in a big boat like this is kind of unheard of. We didn’t even think we were going to get it, I mean, it was pulling like hell. Fortunately, we didn’t have the sea to contend with.”

Once on land, Dubrule told The Day he and his employees would be cutting up the shark for the people on the trip to eat. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries on its website calls the thresher shark “a smart seafood choice because it is sustainably managed and responsibly harvested under U.S. regulations.”

Dubrule credited Salkauskas and Ellis for the dramatic haul, saying it takes a collaborative effort to pull in a shark of such size.

“We put Mike on the rod to begin with, and then when he got tired, Brett took over,” Dubrule said. “I maneuvered the boat a little bit here and there. When we got this fish up at the boat, which is the most dangerous, I came down and helped them.”

Upon returning to the dock, a crowd began to gather as Dubrule spoke with The Day. He said he was sure some people would criticize him for killing the shark rather than letting it go.

“If I caught this thing 30 years ago, everyone would be jumping for joy and bringing me Champagne,” he said. “Now, in the controversial age that we live in, some won’t like it.”

Dubrule said he’s been in the fishing business for more than 50 years and has tagged “thousands” of sharks for scientific research. But, “when they’re good to eat, we cut them up for the customers, like we’ll do this one.”

Thresher sharks are not dangerous to humans, though they’ve been known to injure fishermen with their distinctively powerful tails. Dubrule said he “could see the people splashing in the water” at the beaches of Fishers Island near where the team caught the shark.

He reflected on the shark's sheer size: “This one is a frickin’ moose.”

But it’s not close to Dubrule’s most famous catch. In 1983, “he harpooned a 3,500-pound great white shark and dragged it back to port,” according to Anglers Journal. He faced backlash from Peter Benchley, author of "Jaws," but Dubrule said Benchley was hypocritical in his remarks, given the effect "Jaws" had on shark fishing.

s.spinella@theday.com