I’ve been a participant in the northeastern shark fishery
for a very long time—more than 45 years, if I start counting from my first
shark charter out of Rhode Island, about 40 years if I only consider trips where
I ran my own boat.
It's been even longer if I count one outing back in the late 1960s when,
after seeing two big sandbar sharks caught by anglers off the southwest
Connecticut coast, a friend and I wired the two biggest hooks we could find onto
a water ski towrope, nose-hooked a bunker onto each of them, tied a rock to the
rope for weight, and began slow-trolling that misbegotten rig off the Greenwich
shoreline from a 10 ½-foot plywood skiff.
The idea was that, when we hooked a shark, it would tow us around until
it was exhausted, at which point, we would drag the fish up on a local
beach. Unfortunately—or so we thought
back then—our enterprise never reached the Nantucket sleighride stage.
The bottom line is that, for most of my life, when I had some free time, there was a very good chance thaat I was somewhere out on the ocean fishing for sharks.
Most of those somewhere have been off Long Island, usually
fishing out of Fire Island Inlet, although there were some memorable trips out
of Montauk and Rhode Island, as well.
As one might expect, the shark fishery has changed over the years.
The two biggest changes are a general decline in the number
of sharks that we find, and in the species mix of the fish that we catch.
In the ‘80s, most people started to chase sharks sometime around
the beginning of June, although some began in late May. The May fishing was notoriously slow; anglers
normally caught nothing but bluefish, although a few blue sharks, even fewer
threshers, and the occasional mako or white shark would sometimes show
up in the slick.
Well before I started fishing for sharks—in the 1950s and ‘60s—Long
Island May run of porbeagle sharks, a species related to makos and
whites, which are particularly fond of cool water. The
1971 book Sportfishing for Sharks, by the late Capt. Frank
Mundus and writer Bill Wisner, noted that
“In numbers, porbeagles exceed makos and maneaters [a/k/a
white sharks], and they appear to have a greater tendency to group more than
most other sharks. In that respect they
may be second only to the blues. When
they’re visiting a region, therefore, it’s possible to contact them with
frequency. The Cricket II [Capt. Mundus’
Montauk-based charterboat] has docked with as many as six or eight caught
during a single sailing.”
By the time I made my first Montauk shark trip in 1982, such porbeagle abundance was a thing of the past.
Norwegian longliners
began to target porbeagles during the 1960s, and quickly drove down their
numbers. Although there is no longer
a directed longline fishery for porbeagles in the western Atlantic, the
population has been recovering very slowly and remains overfished, although
overfishing is no longer occurring. Where
Capt. Mundus sometimes brought six or eight porbeagles back to Montauk in a
single trip, fewer than that are now landed on Long Island over the course of
an entire season. The landing of
even a single fish is newsworthy.
Thus, by the time I began running my own boat out of Fire
Island Inlet, shark season didn’t really get underway until early June,
when swarms of blue sharks appeared in local waters. I usually started to target sharks when surface temperatures rose above 60 degrees, but the blues could tolerate cooler
water. I still recall one June day when
I ran out to the 40 fathom line, about 40 miles south of Shinnecock. The surface temperature was only 55 degrees,
and I had my doubts about what we might catch, but we ended up having one of
those days when fish hit the baits as soon as the baits hit the water, we ran
out of bait and almost out of hooks, and when we were ready to leave, the water
beneath the boat looked like some sort of National Geographic special, with a dozen
fish cruising around almost close enough to reach out and touch.
We still see blue sharks off of Long Island, and sometimes still run into swarms. But that happens less than it used to. My last June trip south of Shinnecock saw only four blue sharks take our baits, in a time and place where I might have expected to catch a dozen or two just a decade ago.
A 2015 stock assessment found that the blue shark was neither overfished nor experiencing overfishing, but admitted that there was significant uncertainty in the assessment’s results. While blue sharks don’t support a directed commercial fishery, many are caught and killed as bycatch in pelagic longline fisheries targeting other species, which led the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas to adopt a North Atlantic quota of 39,102 metric tons in 2019. It was the first blue shark quota ever adopted by ICCAT. Although such quota represented a meaningful step forward, some conservation organizations believe that it was too high to provide meaningful protection for the blue shark resource.
Then there are makos, the porbeagle’s swift, beautiful, and
acrobatic relative. Even back in the
glory days of offshore fishing, when tuna, marlin and swordfish were frequently
encountered relatively close to shore, and most sharks were viewed as trash
fish, the shortfin mako was revered as a worthy adversary for the blue water
angler. When I started fishing for
sharks, most Long Island anglers talked about “going out for makos,” rather
than “going shark fishing.”
The first mako of the season usually hit the scales around
Memorial Day, and by the first weekend in June, anglers were bringing in quite
a few fish. The last two weeks of June
and the first week or two of July were the peak season, with multiple
tournaments run out of just about every port between East Rockaway and Montauk. There was also a steady pick of fish throughout the summer, with makos over 200 pounds regularly caught even in the dog days of August. In the fall, makos would follow the bluefish,
their favorite food, and often appeared in chum slicks through early
November. On most shark trips, we’d see
at least one, even if that one was small, and we’d often catch multiple makos
in a single day. Less than ten years ago,
we had a 6-mako day fishing just 20 miles ESE of Fire Island Inlet.
Unfortunately, it’s all been downhill since. A recent ICCAT stock assessment found shortfin makos to be in serious trouble, and late last year, ICCAT prohibited all mako landings. The National Marine Fisheries Service is completing work on a regulation that will prohibit mako landings in United States waters, which is expected to be released very soon.
Even so, recovery of the mako
stock will probably take 50 years.
That might seem like a long time, but it is far shorter than the time it will take to rebuild dusky sharks, which once were abundant south of Long Island. During the '80s, small duskies regularly invaded bluefish slicks inside the 20-fathom line. We caught them while chunking for tuna in the Mud Hole, east of New Jersey. Truly large duskies—fish over 500 pounds—were far from unknown. But the fish were--and still are--extremely vulnerable to longlines. They were killed by bottom longlines set for shark, and they were killed by pelagic longlines targeting swordfish and tuna.
The population
collapsed.
In
2017, the National Marine Fisheries Service finalized a rebuilding plan intended
to restore the population by 2107—a full 90 years. The
conservation group Oceana believed that the rebuilding plan won’t get the job
done, and challenged it in court.
However, earlier this week, the Federal Court of Appeals for the D.C.
Circuit rejected such challenge, finding that NMFS’ rebuilding plan met all of the
applicable legal standards.
Still, no one living today--except a few that are still wearing diapers--will ever see what a
healthy dusky shark population looks like.
At the same time, there's some good news.
The same Sportfishing for Sharks book that I mentioned
before states that
“You could go the full route of your shark-hunting career
without ever contacting a thresher…It has been our experience that threshers seldom
are what could be called abundant.”
That statement might have been true in 1971, but it’s
certainly not true today. Two people I
know have already caught threshers this season, and from now into the middle of
July, I fully expect to hook up to a thresher any time that I set up a chum
slick. It doesn’t happen on every trip,
but it happens often enough that I rarely fish anything lighter than 50-pound
line these days; a 4 ½-hour fight with a 400-pound thresher a few years ago convinced
me to leave the 30-pound stuff at home.
Part of the reason we’re seeing more threshers is the
abundance of baitfish; in recent years, we’ve seen far more menhaden off Long
Island than we’ve seen before. The threshers
will follow the menhaden schools right up to the beach; quarter-ton fish have
been caught in just 40 feet of water. We’ve
also been getting an influx of chub mackerel, which bring in the
threshers. When the chub mackerel swarm,
the odds of hooking a thresher spike.
The population may also be growing, but no one knows for
sure, because a
stock assessment has never been performed;
however, ICCAT considers common threshers to be one of the shark species that
is least impacted by pelagic longlines, which is clearly a good thing. Data
is providing mixed signals, and depending on how it is interpreted, provides reason to believe that common thresher abundance remains in decline,
has stabilized at relatively low levels, or is slowly increasing.
Whatever
the state of the stock, anglers seem to be seeing more of them. A recent paper reported that, at one major
shark tournament, the proportion of threshers caught increased from 0.1% in
1965 to 4.8% in 1995, then rocketed up to 27.8% in 2004. Whether that increase reflects a greater
abundance of threshers or a decline in the abundance of other species is not
completely clear.
The number of sandbar (“brown”) sharks also seems to be on
the rise.
There were a lot of them around years ago—enough to reach
into western Long Island Sound, and capture my 14-year-old imagination, back in
1968. We caught a lot of them in the
1980s, too, until they fell victim to bottom longlines and became scarce off
Long Island. But as soon as they were
put on the “prohibited species” list, and could no longer be retained by commercial or recreational fishermen, we
started to see abundance increase. Although there probably aren’t yet as
many around as there were 40 years ago, few days go by when we don’t catch at least one.
Another fish that is becoming more abundant is the white
shark, although there were always a few swimming off Long Island. Back in ’82, we were fishing about 30 miles
south of Montauk on a calm August day when a 15-foot white shark popped up next
to my 20-foot outboard. It was sobering to think that, at around 2,500 pounds, that fish easily outweighed our boat and all it contained--including us. Although that shark remains the largest white that I ever saw, I’ve seen a few others that weren’t much
smaller. But recently, we're also seeing quite a few juveniles, little sharks six or so feet long, weighing less than 200
pounds.
That, too, is a good sign.
And then there are the “summer sharks.”
While we seem to run into fewer tiger sharks than we did
years ago, tigers are a “data-poor” species, so we can’t say whether the
population is in decline. Some NMFS
data shows a steady decline in both Atlantic commercial tiger shark
landings and recreational catch, which seems to suggest that abundance is not
what it was.
We’re catching about as many hammerheads, mostly smooth
hammerheads, as we ever did, but seeing fewer of them cruising on the surface,
probably because we’re rigging and setting out baits a little differently than
we used to. There is no doubt that hammerhead abundance is not what it was, as all three major hammerhead species were hit hard by commercial fishermen who sought their valuable fins, which are sold in China and used to prepare shark fin soup.
The same smaller baits, fished close to the surface, are
also attracting spinner sharks, a southern species that is new to Long Island
waters. Even a dozen years ago, catching
a spinner shark was rare. Now, there are drone videos showing large
numbers of spinners actively feeding on menhaden schools. The appearance of spinners is clearly attributable
to a warming ocean, but an increasing abundance of bait is also part of the
equation.
So, what does it all mean?
The biggest takeaway is the same message that applies to
most of our other fisheries. We shouldn’t
take current abundance for granted, and we should turn our backs on old practices, which saw fishermen regularly killing sharks that weren’t wanted for food, such as large tigers, hanging them on a scale, and then dumping them back in the water or trucking to a
landfill. There’s no room in today's increasingly pressured ocean for kill tournaments that offer prizes for fish that end
up feeding the flies, rather than the angler who caught it.
It means that we shouldn’t be trapped by the shifting baseline
syndrome, which tempts us to view today’s reduced abundance as normal, and forget what healthy
shark populations looked like. It also means that we should acknowledge our responsibility to those not yet born, and do what we can to rebuild depleted shark stocks, even if we won’t
be around to enjoy the fruits of our efforts.
But it doesn’t mean that we ought to abandon the fishery. Instead, we must approach it with respect for the fish, and perhaps even with an eye toward helping
researchers with their work through tagging programs, or perhaps by providing a platform
that scientists can use to conduct their own studies.
The shark fishery has provided a lot of enjoyment over the
years. As this season starts, it is only
right that we, in return, do what we can to ensure it a
future.
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