SHARKS OF THE CONNECTICUT SHORE

 

August was almost over.

We were trolling sandworms along the Connecticut shore, ‘way down in the state’s southwest corner, between the mouth of the Mianus River and Greenwich Harbor.  It was one of those still, steamy mornings that had you starting to sweat even before the sun was fully above the horizon, when Long Island Sound was perfectly still, and not a breath of wind stirred.

We had enjoyed some pretty good striped bass fishing for just about all of the month, but that morning, our luck seemed to change, with not a single bass deigning to strike the spinner and worm combination that we slowly dragged through the water, just off the rockpiles that stretched out from what, in that part of the world, passed for a sandy beach.

It was getting kind of tedious when a big fish rolled on the surface, just ahead of the boat.

A big fish. 

Our first thought was a fifty-pound bass, although the swirling eddy it left on the surface almost seemed too big for that, and we held onto our rods just a little bit tighter waiting for the strike that never came.  After a while, we made it all the way west to Tweed Island (named after the infamous “Boss” Tweed of New York City’s Tammany Hall), that marks the turn into Greenwich Harbor, pulled in the lines and tried to figure out where to go next.

We noticed a little cluster of boats a few hundred yards offshore.  They were in open water, and so probably not catching bass, but hoping that they might at least be on bluefish, we took a ride out to see what was going on.

We found something completely unexpected.

A fisherman in the stern of the boat was hooked up to something that was much bigger than a blue.  He was hanging on to what was a typical bait fishing setup—a heavy boat rod, a substantial reel (back then, either Penn 500 “Jigmasters” or 3/0 “Special Senators” were commonly used), and probably 30 or 40 pound line.  Whatever he had hooked was completely unimpressed by the gear, and was going wherever it wanted, as a second person at the controls waved nearby boats away if they got too close to the hooked fish.

We stopped to watch the fight, expecting to see an extremely large striped bass eventually brought to gaff, but the battle just kept going on.  Stranger still, maybe about 10 minutes after we got there, a Greenwich Police boat came out of the harbor, pulled alongside the anglers’ boat, and two patrolmen climbed aboard.

A few minutes after that, as the hooked-up angler pumped and reeled, a dark triangular fin broke the surface perhaps 50 feet out from his boat.  At that point, the patrolmen pulled their revolvers, and started throwing shots in the general direction of the fin, perhaps not the smartest decision given that it was a Saturday morning, there were boats scattered across that part of the Sound—although none directly downrange—and bullets have a nasty habit of ricocheting when they hit flat water at shallow angles.

So at that point we figured that we had hung around long enough, and headed back toward the Mianus River while the shots were still being directed the other way.

Near the mouth of the river, just off a big rockpile southwest of Bluff Island, another angler fought what appeared to be a very big fish—at least for the western Sound.  This time, we didn’t stick around to watch the fight and, with the bass fishing not getting any better, headed back to the dock.

The next Monday, the front page of The Greenwich Time featured a photo of two dead sandbar (“brown”) sharks, alleged to be about seven feet long and weighing close to 200 pounds, hanging from a beam above the ramp at the police boat dock.

I, and one of my equally adventurous friends, tried to catch a shark of our own from his 10 ½-foot plywood skiff, but couldn’t manage to get the job done, which was disappointing, as we would have loved to start our first year of 9^th grade with that sort of fish—and hopefully our own picture in The Greenwich Time—on our resumes.

But even though we failed, the August of 1968 certainly ended on an interesting note.

Which is why I now have to laugh when I hear people treat sharks—particularly sandbar sharks—in the Connecticut section of Long Island Sound as something troubling and new.

Historically, sharks have always been a part of the Long Island Sound ecosystem.  Published reports from the late 1800s and early 1900s tell of sailors seeing sharks in the shallows of Long Island’s North Shore bays—not Connecticut, but directly across the Sound from the Connecticut shore.  The species of shark weren’t reported, but they could have been sandbars or, perhaps more likely, sand tigers, a large but somewhat sluggish inshore species that is seen in the Sound today.

Up through the 1960s and early ‘70s, there were occasional stories of striped bass fishermen who had a “huge bass” pick up their bait and strip all the line from their reels before they could pull the anchor and follow.  The problem is, striped bass weren’t really capable of doing that, given the heavy tackle most anglers used back then.  Sharks were.

And there were enough sharks around back in the ‘50s and ‘60s that, every summer, The Greenwich Time would feature a photo on its front page of a couple of marine policemen brandishing rifles or shotguns—I was young back then, and don’t recall which—as they sat in the cockpit of one of their boats, on “shark patrol” off local beaches.  The odds that they ever actually shot at a free-swimming shark are probably surpassingly low, but the fact that they were out there at all meant that sharks were on people’s minds.

And that was off the quiet, western corner of the Connecticut coast, many score of miles from the sea.  So it’s logical to believe that closer to Block Island Sound—say, anywhere east of New Haven—the shark population was a little higher than it was off the Fairfield County coast.

So, again, the fact that people are making such a fuss because they’re seeing sharks today doesn’t make much historical sense.

Unless, of course, those people haven’t lived long enough to understand what a normal shark population looks like.  And that may well be the case.

From the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, an active commercial shark fishery, driven largely by bottom longliners in the South Atlantic, depleted the populations of large coastal sharks, including sandbars, and drove the population to very low levels.  Most people fishing today don’t remember a time when sandbar sharks abundance was close to historical norms; instead, they have only fished during the past 50 years, when the stock was overfished and the population depleted, and so came to believe that the relative absence of sharks was “normal.”

Dr. Marcus Drymon, a biologist from Mississippi who often works on shark depredation issues, used the term “lifting baseline” to describe how that impacts fishermen’s perceptions:

“Experts agree that there are more sharks…today than there were 30 years ago.  But how do these levels compare with levels before 1989, when commercial shark fishing spiked?

“Over time, this question becomes more difficult to answer as people gradually accept environmental decline.  Marine biologist Daniel Pauley calls this habituation ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’  For fisheries, each new generation of fishermen accept the current, often reduced, status of a fish population as the baseline and forgets that there was a time when these species were much more abundant.

“In this case, modern anglers are comparing increased numbers of sharks…to the past 30 years—a time when many shark populations were overfished.

“The recovery of populations that were once overfished can create an opposite situation, known as lifting baselines, with conservation and management efforts leading to population increases.

“Instances where populations have been overfished and then rebuilt can create perceptions of overabundance.  When the species that’s recovering is a predator, that can lead to human-wildlife conflict.”

That seems to be what’s happening off eastern Connecticut, as well as off Rhode Island and parts of eastern Long Island.  So now we hear Connecticut charter boat operators complaining that

“They are everywhere—from Westbrook to Watch Hill.  Thousands of them, not hundreds…

“We have seen over 15 sharks today in two hours…

“We’re not going to be able to fish for stripers the way it’s going.”

The fact that the sharks sometimes steal striped bass, fluke, and other fish off anglers’ lines isn’t endearing them to the captains, nor to some Connecticut anglers.  Thus, we saw one disgruntled angler post on a popular fishing forum that

“At the very least, the anglers that are impacted by their depredation will be allowed to kill them [if NMFS again allows recreational sandbar shark landings], myself and the rest of the rec/charter fleet will certainly kill their limit, whether they’re being eaten or not.  I could care less about eating one.  I just want to be able to kill them without fear of steep fines from the feds.  Already it feels so wrong to do nothing about it.  I feel like I’m being forced by the government to do the wrong thing, which is release sandbars unharmed, knowing full well these sharks are destroying the future fishery and the charter business throughout southern New England.  They have already destroyed the summer bass fishery in a number of places, and for the first time this year I lost a Fluke to a Sandbar shark.  The trend is very concerning.  As time goes on this issue will expand to bottomfish and Tuna, when there’s no Bass left, certainly no Menhaden left, and more sharks than there is now.”

It’s somewhat startling to believe that people still think that way—the sentiment seems to belong back in the 1930s, when hunters convinced state game departments to designate predatory mammals and birds as “varmints” and allowed them to be shot year-round, with some states even paying bounties to hunters who brought in evidence that they had killed a wolf, coyote, fox, bobcat, seal, etc.—but it does exemplify just how upset the sharks are getting some Connecticut anglers.

Back in the 1960s, although sandbar sharks were in the Sound, we never heard much about them stealing a fish from anglers, something that occurs far more often today.  But there might be a good reason for that.

Last April, a paper titled “Characterizing a century of shark depredation in US Atlantic recreational fisheries” was published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.  It made the case that

“At its essence, shark depredation is the result of human-wildlife overlap, in this case, spatially and temporally dynamic overlap between recreational anglers and sharks competing for a shared resource.”

The paper broke the past century down into four 25-year periods, examined the characteristics of the angling, shark, and prey populations for each period, and tried to explain how those characteristics impacted the predation issue.  For the most recent period, 2001-2025, the authors wrote:

“The new millennium ushered in the birth of the shark conservation movement, characterized by the public’s growing understanding of the importance of sharks to marine ecosystems.  During this time, management restrictions led to decreases in US shark landings while recreational fishing effort continued to intensify.  Concurrently, many studies noted the prevalence of positive attitudes from the general public toward sharks.  Yet, a growing body of recreational anglers were expressing concern that proliferating shark populations were causing increases in depredation.  Collectively, these anglers were vocalizing a change in attitude from ‘sharks threaten our safety’ in the 1990s to ‘sharks threaten our recreational fishing opportunities.’  This led recreational anglers to associate rising depredation with management measures that protect sharks.  These frustrations are presently reflected in the SHARKED Act, legislation introduced into the US Congress (2025) to ‘…address problems posed by increased depredation…’  Today, there are more anglers than ever before, shark populations are rebuilding following three decades of management, and many target fishery species are recovering from overfishing.  Thus, overlap between these three groups is likely at an all-time high.  [emphasis added, citations omitted]”

While that formula might not quite fit what we’re seeing off Connecticut—there are plenty of anglers and sandbar sharks, but perhaps not as many target species as there are elsewhere—the overlap between anglers and sharks is certainly substantial.  And given that sandbar sharks typically eat small bony fish, smaller sharks, rays, and invertebrates such as cephalopods, shrimp, and crabs, it may well be that the lack of menhaden and other small schooling fish off the Connecticut coast in recent years has caused the sharks to move closer to shore in search of prey, putting them in a position where they are more likely to compete with anglers for whatever fish are available.

What may be making things worse is that it appears that the sandbar sharks may have learned that fishing boats can provide an easy meal.  One Connecticut charter boat captain complained that

“They follow fishing boats around; they wait for us to hook a fish and then they bite our fish in half.”

NMFS has said that

“Emerging evidence indicates that individual sharks may learn from repeated encounters with fishing activity and associate the sound of vessel engines, the hauling of gear, or the discarding of undersized [or, in the case of striped bass, perhaps oversized] fish with feeding opportunities.”

So, if we add an increasing number of anglers with an increasing number of sharks capable of learning that fishermen provide easy meals, it is natural that depredation incidents will increase.  Unfortunately, too many anglers want to blame the depredation problem entirely on an increase in sharks, conveniently forgetting that an increase in anglers is probably as much to blame.

Thus, we hear anglers say things like,

“We need a balance back and we need to manage the sharks like we manage other species and allow a season for them,”

which is perfectly fine if the best available science indicates that the sharks could sustain the fishing pressure, but does seem a little inequitable, given that there’s no talk about needing to manage the anglers who are targeting what remains of the overfished striped bass population, and generating release mortality from an already stressed spawning stock in order to bring things back into balance.

Perhaps it is the State of Connecticut that comes closest to getting it right:

“Sharks play a vital role in keeping our ocean healthy by maintaining the balance of natural marine ecosystems.

“Sharks have existed in Connecticut’s marine waters for millions of years.  They are apex predators, which means they are at the top of the food chain and have few natural predators.

“Sharks remove sick and weak individuals from prey populations, they influence prey distribution and behavior, and prevent other species from monopolizing limited natural resources and degrading the marine environment.  The presence of sharks is a positive sign of a healthy marine ecosystem.”

Even if it doesn’t feel quite that way when one swims off with your five-pound fluke.