Fishing: Shark-Eating Men

Hunters have a habit of excusing the rhino’s evil temper (he’s nearsighted) and the rogue elephant’s murderous charge (he probably has a toothache). But hardly anybody has a good word for the shark. On any coastline, the cry “Shark!” is guaranteed to produce 1) instant panic in the local chamber of commerce, and 2) a sudden boom in swimming-pool sales. Sailors blaze away at passing sharks with rifles and shotguns, ichthyologists denounce them as witless garbage disposals, and many a fisherman disgustedly reels in his bait at the first glimpse of a triangular dorsal fin slicing the surface.

Silly fellow. On those frequent days when the marlin are lunching someplace else and the tuna are laughing at lures, the smart thing to do is catch a shark. He may or may not be pretty, but he’s always there, he’s always big, and he’ll eat anything—including the intrepid angler if he gets half a chance. In Australia, where 115 swimmers have been killed by sharks in the past 65 years, the shark has long been considered the king of game fish. “Nothing compares to it,” insists Sydney Businessman Peter Goadby. “It’s wonderful to pit yourself against a creature so big and powerful, so perfectly designed for his position in life.” In South Africa, where surf casters hook into 700-lb. sharks close to Durban’s most popular bathing beaches, Electrician Cecil Jacobs, whose catch last year totaled 1,960 Ibs., exults: “It’s fighting, fighting, fighting all the way.” And in the U.S., where some 1,500,000 sharks were caught on rod and reel last year, “monster fishing” is a fast-growing sport among anglers who are weary of coming home with nothing but a sunburn. “You get a 150-lb. shark on a 20-lb.-test line,” says Wayne Snodgrass, an electronics technician from San Rafael, Calif., “and it’s like holding a horse on a shoestring.”

Requiem. There are six extraspecial sharks that have earned a place in the International Game Fish Association’s official list of sporting fish—all six of which, incidentally, belong to the “requiem” family (a tony way of saying that they are hungry for human meat). Smallest is the porbeagle, a toothy rascal that inhabits the North Atlantic and grows to a mere 600 Ibs. There is the slender blue shark, a handsome indigo in color and up to 800 Ibs. of pure ferocity; the weird-looking thresher, which batters its prey senseless with an enormous scythelike tail and comes in an economy-size 1,000-lb. package; and the voracious tiger shark, which reportedly tops two tons—though the biggest ever caught on rod and reel weighed 1,780 Ibs.

Then there is the mako, probably the flashiest fighting fish in the sea. A snaggle-toothed bruiser (record: 1,000 Ibs.) that roams far offshore in both the Atlantic and Pacific, the mako can swim at 40 m.p.h., bite clean through a 500-Ib.-test wire leader, leap 20 ft. out of the water—higher than any marlin. Enraged by the hook, makos have been known to yank luckless fishermen overboard or jump straight into a boat, tear the place apart, then leap back into the water to fight for another two hours. Their killer instinct lingers even after death. At Ocean City, Md., not long ago, a tourist walked past the corpse of a mako lying on the dock, carelessly brushing its head with his foot. Ka-chung! With a sudden muscle spasm, the dead mako sank its fangs into the passerby’s leg.

Turning the Tables. The granddaddy of all sporting sharks is the great white shark, the world’s biggest and most dangerous game fish—usually known simply as “the man-eater.” A true monster that grows to 35 ft. and possibly 8,000 Ibs., the white shark has devoured swimmers in such diverse locations as Matawan, N.J., the Gulf of Mexico, and Portsea, Australia. The rod-and-reel record is a 2,664-pounder landed by Australian Fruit Farmer Alf Dean in 1959. That was just a baby. Dean himself hooked into a bigger one that towed his 30-ft. launch 12 miles, finally broke loose after an epic 5½-hr. battle. Last year, off New York’s Montauk Point, Captain Frank Mundus, a charter-boat skipper and shark specialist, confronted a huge white shark that swam up to inspect the boat and rose so far out of the water that Mundus swears he could have reached right out and touched the gaping mouth. Mundus hit it with three harpoons in the next five hours before finally bringing the great fish to gaff. Length: 17 ft. 6 in. Weight: 4,500 Ibs.

Mundus also has a 3,500-lb. white to his credit (again harpooned), plus a hand in 15 rod-and-reel records that range from a 66-lb. porbeagle caught on 12-lb.-test line to a 683-lb. 12-oz. mako caught on 50-lb. test. To catch a shark, he says, first catch a whale:

nothing draws sharks like a chum of blackfish, whale bits and blood. And for all those fishermen who think that sharks are good for nothing, he has one further word of advice: turn the tables on that shark. Eat it. Blue shark, he says, tastes “just like striped bass.” And the mako and porbeagle are every bit as good as swordfish. In fact, smiles Mundus wisely, many a housewife has bought shark in her friendly neighborhood fish market at $1.60 a pound—as swordfish.