Sunday, July 22, 2018

A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP--SHARKS, ANGLERS AND EVERYONE ELSE


I have no idea how much money I’ve spent fishing offshore in the past forty years. 

You can toss the price of three boats, each one bigger than the last, into the pot.  And not just the initial cost, but dockage, repairs, annual maintenance and, not the last, fuel, which taken altogether probably costs more than the boat itself.  Then there’s gear, which isn’t cheap, plus bait, chum, electronics and…

Well, you get the idea.

And it was all the fault of a single shark.

I was thirteen years old, off on my first real “adult” fishing trip.  While I had fished about as long as I had walked, and had chased cod and pollock and such from various New England party boats since I was six, those were all family trips on what were essentially “tourist” boats—half-day boats out of Provincetown, MA or full-day trips out of places such as Plymouth, where the fish were fairly small and the waters were fairly calm.

But now, I was finally deemed fit to fish with “the guys,” my father and two of his friends, who were planning a midnight run from our home in southwestern Connecticut up to Galilee, Rhode Island, where we’d be fishing Cox’s Ledge, in those days a 2 ½ hour trip offshore, aboard the party boat Sea Squirrel, hoping to find some spring cod.

The cod were certainly there.  As soon as our baits hit bottom, we all began to hook up, and I hung over the stern rail, hanging onto my rod, as I cranked and waited to get the first glimpse of my fish coming up through the crystal blue water.  My fish was small—five or six pounds or so—but a guy in the corner was on something good.  The tip of his rod was throbbing, deep and slow, as he slowly raised his fish toward the surface.  I peered down, and saw the cod begin to appear, first as just a sort of blue glow down in the water, then taking on shape and growing in size.

My father said it probably weighed forty pounds, but we never found out for certain, because as it came close to the top, another shape far longer and sleeker glided in from the side, swam a couple of figure-eights under the cod and then rose and bit it neatly in half.  

The angler started cranking harder, hoping to salvage at least a few steaks from the ruins of his catch.  It looked like he was going to make it, too, when the big blue shark, at least nine feet long, rushed across the stern of the boat, less than a yard from my feet, and raised its head out of the water.  In a magnificent rush of grace and speed, the shark gulped down the rest of the cod, and was gone.

The victimized anglers began to re-rig his broken line; I vowed that I’d catch fish like that one day.             

My time came a decade later, aboard Capt. Charlie Donilon’s Snappa,another Galilee-based boat.  I had sold my a piece on striped bass fishing to Salt Water Sportsman, and spent the check treating my father and one of my uncles to a shark fishing trip.  

We caught a bunch of blue sharks, releasing them with National Marine Fisheries Servicetags implanted in their backs.  The biggest fish was still far smaller than the remembered cod thief.  I caught it at the end of the day, and few months later received a letter from NMFS, telling me that the fish had been recaptured a few miles away.

Thus, the beauty, the sport and the science of sharks became entwined in my mind.  And I have fished for them ever since, participating in the NMFS Cooperative Shark Tagging Program in an effort to increase scientists’ knowledge and, over the past couple of years, working with a research team from Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, helping them find and catch sharks for acoustic tagging and other scientific studies.

Other folks don’t have such a mutually beneficial relationship with these ancient animals.

Last week, a couple of middle-school-aged kids were bitten by sharks while wading at nearby Fire Island beaches.  The local press is calling them “shark attacks,” a factually deficient description, as it’s virtually certain that the sharks had no intention of actually attacking anyone.  They were just feeding on the abundant baitfish in the turbid, sand-filled surf, and the two kids either got in their way or maybe flashed a bit of white skin that looked too much like a menhaden to resist. 

Either way, the “attack” noise is still going on four days later—I just heard some more of it on this morning’s news.  Parents are keeping their kids out of the water for fear of another bite.  One such protective parent said that

“Obviously the sharks probably are not here right now,”
a statement that might have been reassuring but was almost certainly untrue, as some species of shark, including both sandbars and sand tigers, are endemic in New York’s inshore waters each summer, and every time someone puts a foot in the ocean, it’s a pretty good bet that one—and most likely more—aren’t too far away, although most folks probably don’t want to think about that.

The Governor of New York is promising a “multiagency investigation” into the incidents, and drone patrols are flying over the Fire Island surf.  But there’s really not much to investigate, and not much for the drones to see.  

We already know that there are sharks in the ocean and that, last Wednesday, for the first time in about 70 years, two of them made a mistake.  It's hard to imagine any investigation coming up with much beyond that.

The fact that two people were bitten on the same day is a little curious, but given the 70-year hiatus since the last bite, probably not statistically significant.  And since the most common inshore species tend to stay close to the bottom during the day, the drones are going to burn through a lot of batteries for very little return, and for very little reason, because there should be little doubt that the sharks, whether seen or not, are still there.

In fact, there has long been a generally quiet cadre of anglers who visit the beach after dark, intentionally targeting sharks in the surf, who catch them all the time.  They have largely been respectful of their quarry, handling them gently and trying to release them without doing harm.  

But in a case of life imitating art, just like in the movie Jaws, the encounters have brought out the yahoos, who are catching sharks in the surf and dragging them around by the tails, posing with open-mouthed sharks in “hero shots” (yes, we know sharks have teeth, you don’t have to show us) and generally doing enough harm to the fish that they are unlikely to survive the encounter.



The bottom line is that a shark may give someone a nip every now and then and swim off, but when sharks and people meet, the shark is almost always the loser.

The latest species to fall on hard times in the shortfin mako, a swift, beautiful pelagic predator that arguably forms the foundation of the recreational shark fishery of the East Coast of the United States.  Unfortunately (for the mako, if not for its captors), makos are a very good-tasting shark, too, which means that it has been widely harvested by both the commercial and recreational sectors.  


On Friday, NMFS announced its proposed Amendment 11 to the Consolidated Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan, which is intended to protect the shortfin mako.  The draft amendment contains a number of alternative management measures on which the public may comment.  Some of those management measures have been designated “preferred alternatives,” meaning that they are the ones that NMFS is most likely to adopt, absent substantial and convincing public comment to the contrary.

For the commercial fishery, the preferred alternative would limit shortfin mako harvest to fish hauled back to the boat dead, and even then, only by boats with limited access shark permits that are equipped with video monitoring systems.  Such video systems are already required on pelagic longliners, which are currently the only vessels allowed to keep shortfin makos (if dead when retrieved).  The preferred alternative would extend such retention of dead makos to gill net and bottom longline boats as well, but only if the required video monitoring equipment is installed.

The recreational mako fishery would be governed by the 83-inch size limit adopted in emergency regulations last March.  In addition, recreational shark fishermen holding NMFS Highly Migratory Species permits would also be required to use non-stainless steel, non-offset circle hooks wherever they fished.  Currently, such hooks are only required south of 40. 43’ North latitude, to minimize the release mortality of dusky sharks; the latitude restriction would be deleted under the proposed regulation. 

Finally, the proposed regulation would call for the United States to work cooperatively with ICCAT to rebuild the shortfin mako stock.  ICCAT is expected to release a shortfin mako rebuilding plan at some point next year.  Once that plan is released, the proposed regulation contemplates adopting further rules to conform NMFS regulations to the international standard.

Hopefully, that international standard will be rigorous enough to restore the mako stock.  In the meantime, concerned anglers and other individuals would do well to click on this link to obtain a copy of the proposed amendment, and then provide comments to NMFS prior to the October 1 deadline.

Because, sure, a shark might give someone a nip on rare occasion, but over the course of history, we’ve hurt them far, far worse than they’ve ever hurt us.

It’s time that we gave them a bit of help, too.







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