When I set off for Montauk on the easternmost tip of Long Island to check out the highly popular sport of shark hunting, I had a few questions about the apex predators I was going after. First, what’s the deal? I mean, what’s the attraction, how did it come about, and why does it endure? Then secondly, where do you put a shark in a boat when there’s only an eight-by-six-foot area to move around in on the stern, and it’s filled with coolers and buckets and fishing gear? Plus, there’s this built-in contraption right in the middle of the deck with cables and clips all over it that’s called a “fishing post,” which is where you strap a pole to crank in a big fish. And thirdly, what happens to the thousands of sharks caught annually on rod and reel, not just in New York state, but all over the world? Do sharks die in the process? Can you cook ’em? Or is it mostly catch and release?
Whatever the case, I knew this investigation would be important. Since sharks are top predators, and since food chains hinge on what’s at the tops and bottoms of their complex interconnecting networks, the health and security of these extremes affect environmental balance worldwide. Through years of research on gar, for example, I’d learned that the conservation statuses of alligator gar influence all populations of rough fish and catfish and crayfish in a system, so if you allow for a species at the top of a chain to be extirpated, then you can expect organisms in the middle to become anemic.
Meanwhile, we’re seeing an average of 100 million sharks disappearing every year. That’s one-third the population of the United States, a number that’s mind-boggling. Of course, some of those sharks are harvested for food, like in Australia where they’re used for fish and chips, or in Japan and India where their meat is also a traditional staple. Still, Asian countries are taking a big chomp out of this market due to the popularity of shark fin soup, which is rumored to have medicinal qualities, particularly as an aphrodisiac. Mostly, though, shark fin soup is a symbol of wealth and prestige, particularly in China. People spend up to $400 per bowl to show off how cool they are by slurping down a tasteless broth. That’s why we have the practice of “shark finning,” meaning catching sharks and chopping off their dorsal fins, then throwing the fish back to die. Also, the historical belief that sharks are full of supernutrients is total bull. They’re actually full of mercury from eating fish on a planet fueled by coal-burning power plants.
The upshot being: whether or not recreational shark hunting is a sport or a tourist industry or both, or just a drop in the bucket compared to commercial shark fishing (black market and legit), there are more than five hundred species in the world. According to Oceana, “Scientists estimate that fishing has reduced large predatory fish populations worldwide by 90 percent over the past 50 to 100 years. Sharks now represent the largest group of threatened marine species.”1 In fact, according to the IUCN, “A quarter of the world’s sharks and rays are threatened with extinction,” a figure that doubles depending on location and species.2
I met Captain John Krol on his boat dubbed Let’s Go Fishin. It was a foggy July morning when we motored out of the Star Island Yacht Club, which was more of a mooring than a status symbol for this salt-of-the-earth, old-school shark guide who’d been chartering such trips since 1980. That was almost forty years ago, which I figured was close to half his life. With his orange suspendered rubber pants and congenial attitude, Captain Krol was a trim and weathered veteran of the region with the experience necessary to connect me with what I’d come to get.
16. Bizarre photo of a shark-finning wedding. Courtesy of Saatchi & Saatchi, Singapore.
He also had the gear: mostly giant baitcasting reels on heavy-duty megarods sporting pop-bottle-sized Styro-floats. The poles were strung with 100-pound monofilament, and there were two-ounce egg weights right beneath the floats with rubber bands attached to them for a purpose I’ll explain later. Each rig also had a shock leader (or “dog leash”), and a 175-pound wire leader (or “piano string”) attached to an extra-large, no-thrills, big-game J-hook. It was the kind of equipment that foreshadowed monster fish, and I was pumped to be chugging past the jetty. We then shot out to sea, cutting through fog so thick we could hardly see thirty yards in any direction.
Hell if I knew. What I did know was that the boat was rising and diving across the swells, and I had one day to make it happen. Because if I didn’t connect with a shark, any shark, that would be more than a thousand dollars down the drain. But worse than that, it would be a missed opportunity to get answers to my shark-hunting questions, which I suspected pertained to a larger context.
It took over an hour to get to the spot, which I can only describe as out in the middle of nowhere. The fog had burned off, the sun was rising higher, and the sea had calmed. Captain Krol turned the boat so that the breeze was broadsiding it, then cut the motor and dropped in the thawing “bunker chum,” which was blood, viscera, and chunks of oily menhaden meat. It was in a five-gallon bucket with strainer holes drilled in it, and it was tied to the rail.
The chum slick spread out instantly, small chunks filtering out. This immediately attracted some shearwaters and gulls. These guys, maybe five at the most, then followed us for the rest of the day, nabbing scraps.
The chum, however, also attracted another creature. I saw its dark dorsal fin breach amidst the birds and recognized it right off the bat. It was a porpoise porpoising. In fact, it was three porpoises porpoising. Side by side, they rose and dove, which Captain Krol said was a good sign. It meant that there were fish in these waters, so sharks would come around.
“The water here is a nice and clean seventy degrees,” the captain told me, letting out line on a rod. He set it about forty yards away from the boat, dangling a Boston mackerel twenty feet beneath the surface. According to the depth finder, it was 177 feet deep.
Captain Krol then let out the line on another rod. This one had a bunker on it, and he set that float about twenty feet from the rail.
Since the drift fishing had begun, I decided to pump my guide for information. “So,” I asked, “how has this fishery changed since the eighties?”
“I don’t care where you are,” he replied, “fishing’s down everywhere. There’s so much fishing pressure . . . commercial as well as recreational.”
He then told me about the drop in striped bass through the decades, and the drop in sharks as well. He’d never seen many great whites, but he’d caught plenty of makos and threshers and blues. The browns were rarer, but every year, whatever the species, there were always less than the year before.
The time was right to ask my question about the popularity of shark hunting, and how this phenomenon got its start. Captain Krol explained that it used to be all about tuna out here, but when the tuna thinned due to the mushrooming markets, something else had to take its place. Shark then became the thing. There were plenty around, they were exciting to fight, they were pretty much all trophy size, and the sport grew with the tourism.
“Before that,” Captain Krol added, “there was only one shark hunter in these waters . . . Frank Mundus. After trying to kill everything in the ocean, he became a conservationist . . . then tried to save everything in it.”
Ah, Frank Mundus. I’d been hoping to touch on this subject, which is basically unavoidable in Montauk. He’s in the gift shops, on t-shirts and caps and coffee mugs. He’s definitely in the culture and consciousness of these shores. But mostly, he’s in the movies. Mundus was the model for the Ahabesque Quint character in Jaws, which changed the way the world thinks about sharks. Not only did that sensational Hollywood film inspire an entire subgenre of B-horror flicks for generations to come, it also created a climate of fear that is in no way proportional to the real amount of shark attacks that happen on an annual basis. Essentially, throughout the world, there have only been two thousand verified shark attacks in two thousand years—most of them from white, tiger, and bull sharks.
My focus, though, wasn’t concerned with the mythologies and hype of the shark’s place in pop culture or facts concerning shark biology, which others have covered way better than I could ever hope to repeat. My focus was environmental, which is why “Monster Man” Frank Mundus, who inspired the concept of “monster fishing,” was of interest to me.
With his hoop earring and shark-tooth necklace, and his two big toenails painted green and red (one for starboard, the other for port), he was a colorful character, as well as the subject of a few documentaries and TV shows. He used to kill 4,500-pound great whites with harpoons, and he was famous for catching a 3,427-pounder on a fishing pole despite having a crippled left arm. The latter lunker is sometimes considered the world record for rod and reel, but other times it’s debated. That shark had been feeding on a dead whale when Mundus hooked it, and there’s a controversy about whether its capture was legal.
What intrigued me most was Mundus’s come-to-Jesus moment, or whatever it was that made him change the massacring ways he used to be renowned for, shooting and spearing and blowing sharks up with hand grenades. From the research I’ve done, I can’t say what triggered that change, but I can note a couple things he did to change his image. He promoted circle hooks as a way of catching sharks in their jaws rather than in their guts to help increase their chances of survival after letting them go. And according to the New York Times, he “helped start a shark-tagging program and voiced support for catch-and-release fishing.”3
Mundus’ last interview from 2013 includes a moment of disturbing speculation. When asked where he believes American fisheries will be in fifty years, he replied, “They won’t have any fish in the ocean. They’re taking all the fish out. When you have a fish bowl, and you take all the fish out of the fish bowl . . . you don’t have any more fish.”4
Thus, a new question arises: is removing 100 million sharks per year the equivalent of taking all the fish out of a fish bowl?
At first this sounds like a ridiculous question, but since our actions have consequences, it’s not unreasonable to consider—especially if we start seeing a radical change in a chain we all depend on. After all, chains are subject to chain reactions, so all it takes is one compromised link, and everything goes straight to hell.
“This is the boring part,” Captain Krol said an hour later. We’d been watching the birds and the floats with no action whatsoever, and I knew his tone well. It’s what fishing guides say when they take out clients with high expectations, and the bite just isn’t on. But having been in this position many times before, I was aware of the gamble it always is. You either get action or you don’t, and the weather and other factors play a role in what your odds really are.
“I prefer to look at it as ‘relaxing,’” I replied, shooting to reframe the situation. I see plenty of guides with their reputations on the line trying to drum up fish, and I always feel their anxiousness when things get difficult.
So we waited and waited all morning long as Jesus birds came fluttering by. They were these little black and white suckers that landed on the water and skittered on the surface, seemingly walking on the waves.
Still, I kept my eyes pegged on those floats, even though the stretch of the horizon left more to the imagination. Since I’d been waiting months to do this research, I wasn’t about to let those floats out of my sight. The moment something happened, I was prepared to react.
My lack of sleep, however, was beginning to catch up with me. Luckily, I ate a sandwich around eleven, and that gave me some staying power.
We drifted for miles, and the sun got hotter. The captain had thawed out another chum bucket, and he was spooning it over the rail every five minutes. We were each working equally as hard, even if some might see it as us just sitting there not saying nothing.
But sometimes we talked. Captain Krol told me about how he got pulled over for having a headlight out and the process he had to go through to avoid a ticket, and I talked about similarities in shark and gar fishing. With both of these creatures, the idea is that when they work, you don’t. And when they don’t work, you should. Meaning using the drag to tire them out and reeling in when you lower the rod. Plus letting them run, then waiting for them to slow or stop before setting the hook.
But by two in the afternoon, after staring at those floats for hours with nothing appearing except two vivid hallucinations of shadows I thought were fish backs rising, it got too hard to stay awake. The sun was now pretty intense. My skin was burning and the shade of the cabin was calling to me. I was teetering there, drifting off, in danger of falling overboard. So after what seemed like an entire shark week of struggling to stay awake, I swallowed my pride, went inside, stretched out, blacked out, and slept hard for ten minutes straight.
That’s all I needed to snap back. And when I did, I felt strangely rejuvenated. But emerging from the cabin, I knew that we’d already spent eight hours on the water, and my time was up. We still had an hour and a half of motoring back, and I was keeping my guide overtime. Basically, we were both embarrassed: him for not producing a shark, and me for keeping him on the water when he had things to do.
“Okay then,” I muttered, “let’s pack it up.”
Then suddenly a fin! Just like in the movies! It was right beneath the closest float, only twenty feet from the boat. Another hallucination, I figured. But after I blinked it was still there, along with perforated gill slits and two elegant pectoral fins. It was slowly moving toward the boat.
“Shark,” I whispered, and pointed it out.
It was heading right toward the chum bucket, clearly interested in the stench. Like a blue catfish, it had a silky shine to it. There were a couple skinny, zebra-striped fish swimming alongside it, and then it was under the boat.
Captain Krol pulled the bait over to the boat, which is what I was hoping he’d do. The shark emerged below the stern, then circled back toward the bucket. It didn’t seem extremely excited, but I definitely was as it passed by again. It was heading toward the waterlogged bunker that had been hanging there all day.
Then the float began to move. Not back and forth or erratically, but in little shivery micromotions because the shark was going down. Then it took the float completely down, causing the rubber band to snap. The float shot up, signaling that the shark was making a run, even if it was at a casual gait. It was towing the float out to sea as the captain removed the pole from its holder and handed it to me. I accepted the rig and positioned my thumb right above the sluggishly unspooling line.
“Are you ready?” he asked, and I confirmed. When the fish slowed, he flipped the lever into the strike zone and gave me the nod.
Hauling back, I felt the mass, I felt the meat. The rod began to bow. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was on. Like a log.
Then it cut in the other direction, heading toward the other float. I pointed this out as we locked my pole into the fishing post, and the captain grabbed the other reel. The lines got crossed, but it was no biggie. As I cranked down, bringing the fish in, he passed his pole under mine. It took a few tries, and it also took some backtracking, but he managed to get the mess untangled.
Two minutes later, the shark was right under us. It was just swishing in place next to the boat.
“He’s very cooperative,” Captain Krol stated, almost apologetically.
We could see it and it could see us, but it wasn’t afraid. Maybe it had been in this position before and knew it would soon be freed. Or maybe it was just a big, old, lazy lug.
I snapped a few pictures, and he brought out the snips. In another couple minutes, it would all be over, so I put in a special request.
“Can we let it out for another run?”
“Sure.”
So we let the shark out for another run, and it shot off with a bit more spunk. I let it go about thirty yards, then started cranking down again. And again, it came in.
This time, when I got it up the boat, it resisted. Thrashing its tail, it disrupted the surface, and when I lifted its head out of the water, it shook and splashed around.
The captain grabbed the leader, and the fish twisted, starting to get pissed. We were messing with it, and it was not amused.
Now it was time to find out the answer to my question about what happens next. Would we rope its tail and bring it into the boat or would we release it in the water?
“If it was a mako or a thresher, we could bring it back,” Captain Krol told me, which I was strangely pulled to do for the novelty of cooking it and knowing it better. Which felt weird: to know that I’m for catch and release, and that this species is vulnerable, yet there I was wanting to keep a beautiful fish that Captain Krol claimed was too dangerous to have slapping around in the boat.
At least this answered my question about where you’d put a shark in this space. If it was under six feet, Captain Krol said there was room in the aft end to take it back. If it was bigger than that, and if the client insisted on keeping it, he would tow it back.
“How big do you suppose it is?” I changed the subject.
“Seven and a half feet . . . maybe 170 pounds. Two hundred at the most.”
So there I had it, the second largest fish I’d ever caught, at least a foot longer than me and probably more in weight.
“You ready to let it go?” he asked.
“Yep,” I replied, and he cut the wire as close to the teeth as he could get.
It was anticlimactic watching that shark swoosh away, and at first I was bummed to not get the money shot. But as I sat there buzzing hard, rewinding and replaying the details in my head, I was glad I’d asked for that second run, and I was glad to have played it a second time and to have experienced more vigor on its part. But more than that, it was simply amazing to have those images in my brain: the electric blues of the water and sky and shark combined; the adrenal blasts that accompanied those long, graceful, winglike fins; the bright white of its belly; and the payoff in the end.
And the more I kept revisiting what I’d actually caught, the more and more glad I was. I mean, so what if I never touched it? Or got the cliché trophy shot? I had accomplished what I set out to do, my questions had been answered, and I knew it was juvenile to desire evidence to prove what I caught when I had these visions in my head. I also knew that according to IGFA rules, the fact that someone on board had touched the leader meant I caught it. But ultimately, what mattered most was that the process had been humane.
17. Blue shark. Photo by Mark Spitzer.
First, the hook wasn’t stainless steel. It was a plain old metal hook and would corrode away quickly. And secondly, we saved that fish a lot of stress. Sure, I’d provoked it a bit, and it had protested, but by leaving it in the water along with its dignity, we’d taken the higher road. Not only that, we’d foregone slopping blood all over the deck, and nobody got chomped. Its internal organs had not been abused by taking it out of the zero-gravity environment it was accustomed to, and the only elevated heartrate around was my own—to have been privileged enough to have met it.
This was another instance of reframing. In the same way I had reframed the concept of “boring” as “relaxing” (when “frustrating” might’ve been a more appropriate word), I was reframing my expectations according to what sharks actually need. They don’t need posers manhandling them for photos taken at their expense, and we don’t need to grandstand or risk injuries. It should be enough to be satisfied with the fact that we can encounter incredible fish that can school us on their mysteries.
But, I also noticed, there was another reframing in the works. I was flashing back to what Captain Krol had said about fish going down everywhere, and I wasn’t completely convinced of the overall decline. Sure, world fisheries aren’t what they used to be in comparison to the nineteenth century when 150-pound catfish weren’t uncommon across the continent and white sturgeon grew twenty feet long and the cod fishery of the Grand Banks hadn’t yet collapsed due to overharvesting. Still, we are making progress in reclaiming some of our overfished niches. We’re reestablishing alligator gar, for instance, not just in the southern states but in more northern places throughout their native range. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources Division of Fisheries released 1,600 juvenile gator gar in 2017 as part of their Alligator Gar Reintroduction Program.5 Also, we may not have as many stripers in the ocean as there used to be, but now that they’re being stocked in force from coast to coast, they’re more abundant in fresh water (e.g., the Georgia Department of Natural Resources adding 4.7 million stripers into the upper Coosa River between 1973 and 1992).6
In the meantime, at least in the United States, we’re taking aggressive measures to protect shark fisheries. Off Montauk, there’s a one-shark-per-day harvesting law for recreational anglers with a minimum length of fifty-four inches for permissible species. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce, has established management plans and objectives. Also, Congress passed the Shark Finning Prohibition Act of 2000 to limit the amount of damage to sharks. There are loopholes, of course, and it’s often two steps forward and one step back when we strive to protect species that other countries still eliminate willy-nilly, but for the reframing I need to do in order to stave off despair, I’ve got to reject the totalizing statement that our fish are going down everywhere. Because if I decide to see things that way, and if we all decide to see things that way, then there’s no hope, so why even try?
That’s why I did a completely uncharacteristic thing. I went to the cooler, and even though I knew a beer would wipe me out, I got myself an ice-cold IPA in the middle of the day. Then popping the top, I raised it to the sky—not in a toast to anything, but in general celebration of what we’ve got. Because what we’ve got is literally beyond awesome. And if we can let what we’ve got work its magic, that’s enough to keep us in awe for a lifetime.
Just as quickly as I caught that shark, the fog rolled in and the wind came up. It got choppy, so we put the pedal to the metal, cruising through the ghostly gray. A gray so ghostly, in fact, that a fishing trawler emerged like an apparition. It had outrigger booms extending from both sides to drag giant nets which snag creatures that end up as collateral damage. Like dolphins, which are frequently pictured as the poster children for the price we pay for tuna fish. But beyond the tons of bycatch which get snuffed by commercial trawlers, there’s the reality that when bottom trawling takes place marine environments get destroyed. Shellfish grounds are sacrificed. Microorganisms take a hit. All sorts of life gets smeared in the process.
But damn, that boat was dramatic! It looked like a haunted thing, and it burned its image into my brainpan in the same way the fish markets in Borneo did a week before. I’d seen the same tuna there that we have here being sold in sizes so scurvy you know it’s a crime. One reason we’re now running short on twelve-foot bluefins is because much more desperate countries with a lot less regulation and enforcement continue to allow for mass commercial molestation. It takes eight to twelve years for those tuna to reproduce, but we’re not letting them get that old. In countless places all over the world, fish are being taken out of the equation before they even reach spawning size. Take bluefin tuna, for instance, whose populations, according to the Guardian, have “plummeted by 96% from unfished levels during nearly a century of overfishing.”7
This is a travesty, and it’s happening at a time when global marine populations have been gutted in comparison to decades before. As noted in the Borneo Post, for example, “over-fishing, pollution and climate change . . . between 1970 and 2010” have reduced the entire Scombridae fish family (which includes tuna, mackerel, and bonito) by 74 percent.8 And as Marco Lambertini, head of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), states, “In the space of a single generation, human activity has severely damaged the ocean by catching fish faster than they can reproduce while also destroying their nurseries.”9
18. Ghost trawler. Photo by Mark Spitzer.
In Malaysian waters, the widespread practice of taking immature fish out of the system was most visible to me with the yellowfin tuna at the Central Market in Kota Kinabalu. As you can see in the photo below, the sixteen-inch fish in the foreground and the foot-long fish behind it will never add their genetic stock to the wild populations swimming in the South China Sea. This species typically reach sexual maturity between twenty-one and twenty-six inches, but like fisheries all over the planet suffering from overfishing, especially in developing countries, the consequences are crystal clear: if you take immature fish out of a fishbowl, then they can’t reproduce anywhere. So when you have 100 million sharks being removed from the system every year, along with the unquantifiable genocide of millions of tuna, and all the other types of destruction we create for short-term gain, you get irreversible, disastrous results. Or in the words of Dr. Guy Harvey of the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation, “In 40 years, a fishery that was sustainable for thousands of years has been essentially wiped out.”10 Meaning our fishbowl is already toast, so we are whipping a dead horse.
19. Immature yellowfin tuna in Borneo. Photo by Mark Spitzer.
Luckily, though, back at the dock there were a lot of stripers going on, which helped me reframe the indisputable loss I couldn’t help acknowledging. Massive bass, most of them forty to fifty pounds, were being brought in by the wheelbarrow load. Their heads were the size of basketballs, and their immensity prompted me to reconsider a call I’d made in my last fish book: that striped bass are just too pretty to be thought of as grotesque.
Because these bass were true monsters! Healthy, strong, enduring monsters. Monsters off Montauk, where I got myself a trophy shark, then let it go, but kept a few realizations.
The first one being that it would be too easy to conclude with a platitude like “monster fish have a lot to teach us, but to learn from them we need to keep them around so that all their histories of crashes and regeneration can be allowed to render messages essential to their survival and our own.”
Which is true, but of course there’s something more. Something beyond the fact that shark and tuna need protecting, which everybody knows. It was something deeper. Seriously! Something telling me that I was heading in the right direction, but if this monster-fish thing is really more than just an excuse for me to go fishing, then I need to look even harder. Way harder! Which might not make for a tidy ending, but that’s where I found myself, standing on a dock at Montauk, opening a brand new bucket of chum.
20. Mike Smedley and Michael Smedley with Montauk monster striper. Photo by Jonathan Smedley.