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.
No
animal should be handled with that level of disrespect, but it’s particularly
inappropriate for the sharks most likely to be caught from a northeastern beach;
all three species, the sandbar, sand tiger and dusky, are protected species
that may neither be targeted nor retained in New York and many other states,
as their populations have already fallen below sustainable levels.
In the case of the dusky, the population has
fallen so low that NMFS biologists think that it will take about 90 years for
it to recover; some other
biologists believe that rebuilding the population to sustainable levels could
take as long as 400 years.
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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