Given that sort of talk, the
purpose of the SHARKED Act, as described in the Tampa Free Press, is
laudably moderate, and not immediately threatening to shark populations. It merely seeks to establish
“a federal task force dedicated to addressing this complex
issue. The task force would bring
together key stakeholders including federal agencies, regional fisheries councils,
scientists, and various fishing and conservation organizations. Their collective mission would be to
research, manage, and mitigate shark interactions that are negatively affecting
fisheries and potentially disrupting marine ecosystems.”
Of course, shark depredation is nothing new. Sharks have been stealing fish from fishermen
for a very long time, just because, like any predator, a feeding shark will
always seek an easy kill that allows them to feed while expending a minimum of
energy, and there are few easier kills than the fish tethered to an angler’s or
commercial fisherman’s line, a fish that, by struggling, is advertising its vulnerability
and availability to every and all predators in the vicinity.
For a while, people forgot what shark depredation was like, because
shark populations were heavily fished, and populations driven down. But now that some species are coming back, there aren’t too
many people left who remember what a healthy shark population looked like. One researcher
has found that anglers less than 60 years old really can't conceive of the number and size of the sharks that once filled our oceans. Given that loss of anglers' institutional memory, to many fishermen, a merely healthy shark population seems like a population that;s growing out of control.
So maybe its time that we look backward, to gain an understanding of what anglers
did to address depredation before shark stocks declined.
Ernest Hemingway, for example, understood depredation well. Back in the 1930s, there was a spectacularly strong run of giant bluefin tuna off Bimini in the Bahamas—almost certainly fish leaving their Gulf of Mexico spawning grounds, and on their way to summer off New England and maritime Canada.
The offshore
anglers of the era repeatedly hooked up with the big fish, but no one ever
landed one intact, because there were so many sharks that they would swarm the
hooked tuna, and leave it resembling an apple core—an intact head and
intact tail, but with everything in between eaten down to the bare backbone.
Hemingway explained it this way:
“We tried to fight them fast, but never rough. The secret is for the angler never to
rest. Any time he rests, the fish in resting. That gives the fish a chance to get strong again…You
don’t have to kill a horse to break him.
You have to convince him…To do this, you have to be in good condition.”
As
explained in an article published in Anglers Journal a few years ago,
“[Hemingway] pioneered the technique of pumping fish—raising and
lowering the rod tip and reeling in the slack, using his back and legs to pressure
and defeat the fish—which in part gave rise to innovations such as the fighting
chair with a footrest and bucket harness…”
which allowed anglers to bring their entire body to bear
when fighting a big fish.
Such an active fighting technique contrasted sharply with
some of the angling going on in those days when, using 72-thread (roughly
210-pound-test) line and two-handed reels,
“inexperienced anglers fought big fish by paying out yards of
heavy line, the weight of which beat down the fish,”
but also gave the sharks plenty of time to claim their meal.
As Hemingway observed,
“There is tackle made now, and there are fishing guides
expert in the ways of cheating with it, by which anybody who can walk up three
flights of stairs, carrying a quart bottle of milk in each hand, can catch
gamefish over 500 pounds without even having to sweat much.”
If we apply Hemingway’s comments and accomplishments to
today, when people are again complaining about shark depredation of their hooked
bluefin (and other species of) tuna, there are some very distinct parallels.
Fighting chairs, bucket harnesses, and heavy conventional
rods and reels are nowhere near as popular today as they were when I first
started fishing offshore in the late 1970s, but the need to beat big gamefish
quickly, before the sharks show up, hasn’t changed. So how are anglers fishing today?
A lot of us have gone to heavy “stand-up” rods, tackle that originated, and was perfected, in the California long-range fishing fleet, where anglers fish for triple-digit yellowfin tuna from the decks of what are essentially big party boats, carrying too many anglers, who all fish at once, for them to fight their fish from a chair.
The problem that the long-ranmge ran into was that the traditional big-game rods—typically,
about seven feet long, with a stiff tip and a longish butt section--gave the
fish too much mechanical advantage. The
tuna were, pulling on the long end of a lever, and so multiplying
the force exerted on the fishermen, who had difficulty staying in the fight.
To solve the problem, long-range fishermen developed the
stand-up rod, which was significantly shorter than the “boat rods" used with
fighting chairs, and usually measured about 5 ½ feet in length. The stand-up rod featured a short but, and long foregrips,
which allowed anglers to move the fulcrum of the lever closer to the tip, thus
cutting down on the advangage enjoyed by the fish. The rod's tip section tapered quickly,
so that the rod bent sharply when a fish was being fought, again cutting down
on the fish’s leverage.
When matched with a rod belt and a fighting harness that
wrapped around the angler’s waist and lower back, the stand-up rod—while not
quite as effective as a fighting chair and bucket harness—allows fishermen to fight
a big fish with their entire body, and keeps fighting times short. Just last week, a young woman fishing from my
boat used such gear to beat a 300-pound-class thresher shark in about an hour,
even though the fish weighed more than twice as much as she did.
Despite its limitations and specialized gear, stand-up fishing
isn’t too different from traditional angling with a bucket harness and chair—except
without the chair. It still kills tuna
pretty quickly, and mostly keeps the sharks from stealing a mea
The other recent approach to tuna fishing is “jig ‘n’ pop,” where anglers use (mostly) spinning gear to cast plugs or drop jigs to tuna, some of them well into the “giant” class. The rods and reels used are technological marvels, with the rods wrought from carbon fibers, and precision-machined reels, loaded with 100-pound-tenst braided lines, that have evolved far beyond the reels used even a dozen years ago.
Such equipment can easily stand up to a big tuna’s abuse.
But the human body that employs such gear hasn't changed much in thousands of years, and from a human mechanics perspective, spinning gear isn’t particularly good for fighting fish. There are few provisions for a harness, so anglers are forced to fight big tuna with their hands, arms, and shoulders; their backs might get a little play, but their legs are out of the fight.
To make matters worse, the rods tend to have over-long butts and, in the case of rods intended for casting, very long tips, again giving the tuna a mechanical advantage. Add 30 or more pounds of drag to match the 100-pound line, and the fight becomes physically daunting. It takes a strong and conditioned angler to get the job done, and in many—probably most—cases, the initial fisherman breaks down, and multiple anglers end up fighting the same fish over an extended period.
I know of one bluefin of somewhere over 80 inches—toward the
low end of the “giant” category—that recently took multiple anglers roughly
three hours to land on spinning gear. They undoubtedly had a good time, and ended up
with a fish untouched by sharks, but anyone fooling around with a bluefin for
as long as three hours shouldn’t be surprised if they only get back the
head. A shark can only resist for so
long.
The current use of spinning gear to catch big fish is arguably the mirror image of Hemingway’s angler who “who
can walk up three flights of stairs, carrying a quart bottle of milk in each
hand” beating a big fish “without having to sweat much. For while catching a big tuna on spinning
gear is a physically demanding activity that involves plenty of sweat, from the
tuna’s perspective, it has the same end result—an extended fight that often
ends in shark depredation.
If anyone wants to have a reasonable chance to beat the sharks
while fighting big tuna, they need to bear down from the beginning, maximizing
the pressure put on the fish, never relenting, and using adequate gear that
allows them to bring the fish to the boat in the shortest possible time.
Do anything else, and the blame for any depredation falls
not on the sharks, but on the angler.
And when you come right down to it, the same thing is true with respect to little fish, as well.
Not all that many years ago, if you looked at what the hard-core
anglers were using to pull snapper and grouper off Florida reefs, you’d see broomstick-stiff rods and reels like the #6/0 Penn Senator—or maybe the similar-sized,
but somewhat less expensive #67 and #68 “Long Beach” reels—loaded with 80-pound
line, the sort of gear needed to haul a fish away from the reef and get it to the boat quickly.
Today, very similar to what’s happening with tuna, you see a
lot of anglers using “slow-pitch” jigging gear, which employs very soft rods to subtly manipulate the lures, to catch snapper, grouper, amberjack, and other reef fish. But while such slow-pitch rods may give the jigs a
tantalizing action, they’re completely worthless for fighting fish. They have no backbone at all and a noodly
action, and completely collapse under the weight of a fish, forcing the
angler to slowly crank their catch to the surface, providing all the
opportunity in the world for a shark to come along and claim the prize.
Even anglers who aren’t using slow-pitch gear seem to have
forgotten how to get a fish off the bottom and into the boat with any kind of
alacrity. Every now and then, I make the
mistake of watching a video of some Internet expert fight a decent grouper,
snapper, or amberjack. More often than
not, the video will portray the self-proclaimed “expert” putting his foot on
the rail of the boat, so he can rest his rod on his knee while he holds the whole
thing by the reel’s sideplate, the way Bubba typically holds a reel meant for cranking
in two-pound largemouth bass. Thus twisted
up like a pretzel, tenuously hanging on to his rod, the Internet angler then
slowly cranks the reel handle, making appropriate noises all the while.
I’m embarrassed to say that, watching such exhibitions, I’ve
been known to yell at the computer, “Fight the goddamned fish! Stick the rod in your gut, get hold of the
foregrip, and pump that thing up to the boat.
Stop jerking around!”
But, of course, the guy in the video can’t hear a word that
I’m saying, and wouldn’t care if he could.
Instead, he just goes on slowly cranking. Sometimes he gets the fish, sometimes a shark
wins the race. And in the latter case,
of course, the shark always gets blamed, not the anglers who, through his
dawdling, called the shark in.
I’m not going to argue that anglers going back to heavier
tackle, and boating their fish more quickly, is going to end all shark depredation. As I noted at the start, depredation
has gone on for a very long time, and has multiple causes. Maybe the biggest one isn’t more sharks, but
more anglers, which often bunch up over the most popular reefs and wrecks,
and condition the sharks to associate fishing boats with food. Combine more anglers with fewer fish on the
reefs, and human/shark competition is bound to increase. And an increasing number of some species of
shark will make encounters more likely.
Still, the easiest way to minimize shark depredation is to
minimize the time that a hooked fish is in the water and vulnerable. And the way to do that isn’t much changed
from Hemingway’s day.
Use adequate tackle.
Fight the fish hard. Put the fish
in the boat as soon as you can.
Doing so certainly won’t prevent all shark depredation. But it will help keep it under control.
Without bothering the sharks at all.
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