The great ones -some shark fishing HISTORY
Walter Maxwell,Herb Goodman,Frank Mundus and many others that we will share with you.Some are gone and some are with us and continue to set standards to reach high for.
HistoryWith a few exceptions, sportfishing for sharks has a very recent history. Classic books detailing the early days of big-game fishing don’t even discuss sharks, except to mention them in a negative context, such as when they attacked hooked tuna or billfish. Prior to the 1960s, only a few areas throughout the world boasted specialists who caught sharks for sport, and in some cases they did so from shore.
Captain William Young from California was one of the early sharking pioneers at the turn of the century, and he popularized adventure with sharks in his writings about killing 100,000 of them from Hawaii to Australia and the Red Sea.
Australia became a hotbed of sharking before the sport became popular in most other areas due to a relative abundance of the great white. Alf Dean was the most famous of the early recreational sharkers, capturing six white sharks weighing more than a ton, including the 2,664-pounder at Ceduna on April 21, 1959, which the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) still recognizes as the all-tackle and 130-pound line-class world record. Dean also holds the 80-pound line-class record with a 2,344-pounder caught in November 1960. Yet those whites were small fry compared to one he lost after a 51/2-hour battle; that fish was estimated at 30 feet and 4,000 pounds. Fossil shark teeth indicate that even such modern monsters are much smaller than the really great whites that once ruled the oceans.
The once consistent white shark fishery in South Australia and the east coast of that country also produced a 2,240-pounder for Bob Dyer, who holds the 20-, 30-, and 50-pound line-class records with whites of 1,068, 1,053, and 1,876 pounds. Dyer’s wife, Dolly, caught a women’s record 1,052-pounder, which stood until Janet Forster boated a 1,164-pound white at The Pages in March of 1994. Ms. Dyer still holds every white shark women’s record from the 20- to the 80-pound line classes, however, with fish under 1,000 pounds caught from 1954 to 1957 off Cape Moreton, Queensland.
It’s unlikely that these records will be broken, at least not soon, as white sharks are becoming ever scarcer and have received protection from exploitation throughout most of the world. Furthermore, those early anglers both chummed and baited with mammals, a practice since banned by the IGFA, although the old records continue to be recognized.
South Africans were also great shark anglers. S. Schoeman, in his classic book Strike, cites a 986.98-kilogram shark landed from the rocks at Hermanus in 1928 by Bill Selkirk with rod and reel and 18-cord line—“certainly the biggest fish ever caught by man on rod and line from the rocks.” Reg Harrison of Durban is also credited with a blue pointer (white) of 752.7 kilograms in July, 1953.
New Zealand anglers appreciated the mako long before it became popular in other areas, and Zane Grey wrote about his experiences fishing for them there. Threshers have also long been popular as a gamefish with anglers in that country.
It was Captain Frank Mundus who first popularized sharking in North America, and then Jack Casey who changed the nature of that sport from a “man against beast” killing affair to the largely tag-and-release fishery pursued today.
Mundus developed sportfishing for sharks at Montauk, New York, after World War II and brought public attention to his “monster fishing” by displaying jaws and selling shark teeth while booking charters for his boat Cricket from a booth at the New York Sportsmens Show during the 1950s. Mundus was as offbeat as the fish he pursued, sporting port and starboard painted toenails, harpooning porpoises and pilot whales for chum, and berating his customers’ skills—all of which brought him a steady supply of business. It was Mundus who provided the inspiration for Peter Benchley’s captain in Jaws, the book and movie that led to a huge increase in recreational sharking throughout the U.S.
Even before Jaws, sharking had already caught on along the south shore of Long Island by the 1960s. The first Bay Shore Tuna Club Shark Tournament resulted in such a massive catch of blue sharks that boats had to wait hours for weigh-ins, and disposal became a significant problem. All sharks were then still regarded as man-eaters to be eliminated from the ocean, but that concept changed within a decade due to the pioneering work of Jack Casey, which started when he was a fisheries scientist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Marine Fisheries Lab at Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Casey started studying sharks and one summer took roughly 40 juvenile white sharks from longlines placed not far off Sandy Hook’s beaches. He had to keep that information quiet, however, for fear of starting a panic along the Jersey Shore. He also fished with another sharking pioneer at Montauk, John Walton, an antiques dealer in New York. Not only did they catch and release many sharks, but Casey and his father also caught a great white exceeding 1,000 pounds.
When the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) was formed in the early 1970s, Casey was shifted to the NMFS Lab at Narragansett, Rhode Island, where he established the shark tagging program that continues to this day. Unique among tagging (see) programs at that time, it relied on the volunteer efforts of anglers to place the volume of tags that would paint a picture of the migratory patterns and growth rates of sharks. Anglers responded to Casey’s efforts; within a decade, sharking had turned from a killing sport to one in which the vast majority of the catch was released. It soon became almost a disgrace to bring in a blue shark (which aren’t highly regarded as food), except for large specimens in tournaments.
That attitude has been further reinforced by declining shark populations in the face of commercial fishing pressures. Many tournaments have eliminated blue sharks altogether, and some don’t allow tiger sharks at all. Most U.S. Mid-Atlantic contests are now strictly for the most esteemed of sharks, the mako—although threshers may also be included.
The popularity of sharking spread from Long Island to New Jersey during the 1970s, and some of the largest shark tournaments were held there for two decades before a significant drop in the resource reduced interest somewhat. Jaws inspired country-wide interested in sharking, and even many Florida skippers who previously hated sharks found they could improve their business with charters for the fish that created so much interest among the general public.
Another significant recreational shark fishery developed off Virginia, and there is now at least some interest all the way up the Atlantic coast to Maine. The Sarasota area along Florida’s Gulf Coast had an active sportfishery for sharks even before Jaws, and the California fishery has built up steadily. West Coast fly anglers have realized that they have a unique opportunity to pursue quantities of small blue sharks, which will eat flies just about as readily as anything else. Makos are also a target off California due to a sharp decrease in the thresher population from commercial fishing pressure.
The willingness of the Chinese to pay high prices for fins to be used in shark fin soup put a big dent in North American shark populations during the 1990s, except for blues, which aren’t desired for that use. At one point, some commercial fishermen were cutting the fins off sharks and throwing back the live bodies; ultimately, NMFS prohibited this practice.
Because most sharks are slow growing, take a long time to mature, and then produce few young, they can be very easily overfished—after which it can take decades to restore the fishery. Shark populations have crashed in every area, no matter how remote, where commercial shark fisheries have been established—and usually within a few years after the fishery was established. This fact was well known even during the first half of the twentieth century, but the same practices were allowed when the Chinese market for fins developed; species such as the sandbar (brown) and dusky may remain scarce for many years.
NMFS belatedly protected the extremely vulnerable sand tiger, which sports jutting teeth like a mako but is actually a lazy ground shark (making them a favorite species for aquariums) and lives in shallow waters. Also placed on the protected list were the white and basking sharks.
What used to be a wide-open sportfishery along the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico with no restrictions has become a tightly controlled situation with a limit of two fish per boat as recently as 1998 for all except the small coastal species—and a prohibition on the sale of these fish by anglers and even most captains.
SOUTH FLORIDA SHARK CLUB -President SFSC-Founding Member est 1983 SFSC-Website Administrator BIG HAMMER SHARK TOURNAMENT -Founder Rene Memorial Sharkathon -Founder NMFS Shark Tagger
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