Massachusetts has been busy over the last month, making some new rules that will affect many of us. I’m fine with what’s coming with regard to false albacore and bonito, after seeing how many albies and bones have been walked off the jetties over these past few seasons, it’s pretty apparent that these species require some regulation. And it’s a good thing that the state standardized how a striped bass must be measured; I’ll be honest, I thought it was already standardized that the measurement was taken between the bottom lip and the tail as it fell naturally, but was wrong and an official call of clarity is the best kind of line to draw.
Now we come to the subject of what they call ‘land-based shark fishing’ (surfcasting for sharks) and all of the controversy that surrounds this pastime. Beach sharking used to be a relative ‘secret’, practiced by small contingent of devoted casters that enjoyed the challenge of landing sharks from shore. Social media got ahold of it and did what social media does to anything that looks ‘cool’ and garners lots of engagement from followers…it blew it up.
And, after that, land-based sharking sort of became the ‘Tide pod challenge’ of saltwater fishing, where anglers with an internet reputation to uphold, continued to push the envelope until they crossed the line into territory just might break the law. There have been at least a handful of incidents where shore-based anglers were chumming off Cape Cod beaches with swimmers and/or surfers in close proximity. It only took me a few minutes searching on Google to find a September 2024 article from the Provincetown Independent detailing an altercation between surfers and land-based shark anglers who were preparing to fish for sharks. The surfers say they were in the water before the anglers cast a line and soon after, a drone carrying a dead bluefish and towing a line from their rod flew well past the surfers and dropped the bait. The surfers called the police after one of their crew observed a “giant upwelling” behind the surfers as a great white surfaced. The article went on to quote one of the surfers as saying, “We all just paddled in as fast as we could!”
So there are a lot of problems with this particular incident. The fishermen were there first and if you know someone is going to be chumming for sharks, you probably shouldn’t get in the water. By the same token, if you’re planning to fish for sharks in daylight, in a place that is widely known to attract white sharks, you probably shouldn’t do it within close proximity to a public parking lot, and you definitely shouldn’t give anyone a reason to bring in any kind of authority figure into the situation. Additionally, you just don’t try to chum sharks – of any species – into water where people are swimming, that might delve into reckless endangerment territory. It’s called common sense, and neither group was exactly crushing it in that department.
No charges were filed in this incident, but you can bet your bottom dollar, and your favorite rod and reel, that this incident played a big part in the state’s decision to ban land-based shark fishing along hundreds of miles of Massachusetts beach that are known to host great whites, from Plymouth, all the way around the Cape to Chatham. The new law also prohibits the use of “mechanized and remote control deployment devices such as drones to deploy bait when fishing with rod and reel,” and makes chumming illegal from shore between sunrise and sunset. Cape towns are desperate to turn around their dwindling tourism numbers, at least of some of which is being blamed on the increasing numbers of white sharks and the public’s collective fear of sharks. The trio of anglers maintains that they weren’t targeting great whites.
But, perhaps the most damning thing to come out of this incident came in the video posted by one of the anglers; I won’t further their cause by mentioning any names, but I will tell you that one of them is trying to run a social media fishing company. The video shows the fishermen rigging a dead bluefish to their drone, surfers can be seen in the water and one of the fishermen says, “We got surfers in our way. They’re going to be getting a bluefish dropped on their head.”
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes…the only difference here is, all land-based shark fishermen that fish Cape Cod now have to own this prize.
