VIDEO: 12-year-old boy catches 700-pound great white shark in Florida 

A 12-year-old boy became a viral sensation after he caught an 11-foot-long great white shark while fishing during a trip in Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday. 

Campbell Keenan was about a mile off the coast of Port Everglades when he threw in his hook baited with a tuna. Never did he expect that he would get a once-in-a-lifetime catch that weighed an estimated 700 pounds. 

“So, I was a little bit nervous — like, I don’t know if I want to go up against a shark,” Keenan told CBS News. “But it did make me really excited.”

Video footage of the moment the shark gets hooked on a line shows the predator swimming next to the boat with the line attached to his mouth. 

“They gave the rod to me and I just started crankin’,” said the teenage boy, who took around 45 minutes to finally reel in the beast, along with help from the crew. 

“You guys got a giant great white!” one of the crew members yelled as the shark was being pulled up. “This is like the most sought-after fish in the ocean.”

“We had to hold onto him. We had to make sure he wasn’t going to go off the boat,” Colleen Keenan, his mother, said. “He had to hold on to the reel, and he was strapped in and not really, so that was scary.”

Instead of keeping the shark, however, Keenan and his mother decided to get the shark tagged and released it back into the water so its movements can be tracked and studied by researchers. 

“We actually tagged it and they named it, and it’s like adopting a fish,” said Captain Paul Paolucci. “Then they released it back into the water.”