If you ask striper fishermen plying broad sections of the Southern New England coast to assign a name to the summer of 2026, you can bet that a high percentage of those anglers would call it “The Summer of the Shark.” A sudden boom in the numbers of brown sharks over the past decade has come to a head this year, after seeing steady increases in the numbers of brown sharks and their clashes with hooked and freshly released stripers. The consensus among anglers fishing places like Block Island, Newport, RI and Fishers Island, NY are that 2025 was bad and 2026 is noticeably worse.
The epicenter of the shark activity in 2026 has trained its crosshairs directly on the area of Southwest Ledge off Block Island. During the last week of July, our Long Island/Metro Edition editor, Matt Broderick said he watched a half-dozen boats fishing a small section of structure off Block Island battling at least a dozen stripers and only one of those fish made it to the boat in one piece! The rest of those fish were chopped in half by 8- to 10-foot brown sharks that were hanging with the boats, awaiting an opportunity to attack a hooked striped bass.
Several fishermen and captains have expressed concern that it appears that these brown sharks have learned to associate a fishing vessel with an imminent feeding opportunity and will shadow their boats until that opportunity comes to fruition. Anglers fishing after dark have even observed that the sharks are now tracking boats after dark by their running lights and, in some cases, they’ve had to shut their lights off to get rid of the sharks!
If all this sounds like a fairytale dreamed up by anglers sporting overactive imaginations, check out this quote from NOAA’s page on shark depredation…
“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 fish with feeding opportunities. Several areas have been identified as “high depredation risk areas” in the Gulf of America. Beginning this year, NOAA scientists will use these areas for experimental analysis in cooperation with commercial shark longliners. Teams will establish a listening station acoustic telemetry array at each site. Sharks captured in these areas will be tagged with acoustic pinger tags, which will follow their movements and residency for one year. Simultaneously, NOAA will monitor depredation rates at these sites in cooperation with for-hire and recreational anglers, who report their fishing activities and depredation rates. Lessons learned from these experiments will help determine if depredation is isolated to individual sharks or systematic across the population. These experiments in the southeast United States have the potential to be tested in other areas where depredation is an issue, such as the U.S. Pacific and Caribbean Islands.”
While the quote doesn’t directly mention the Northeast, brown sharks are found in temperate and tropical climates around the world and are a regular depredation culprit throughout their range. Hopefully NOAA will move to conduct some surveys in the Northeast as well, because things have gone from 0 to 100 in the matter of just a few years.
