When I first started striper fishing, clashes with sharks were so rare that news of a hooked striper being bitten by shark would literally make the news. I remember the first time I heard of it happening. A surfcaster fishing from the rocks in the general vicinity of Woods Hole, MA had a 30-pound class striper bitten off right behind the gills. I want to say it was around 2008, and the grisly photo made news programs and papers all over New England. Despite my best efforts to find it, I can’t seem to dig up the photo or a single news story, but it happened!
Encounters with sharks grew steadily through the decade that followed, and some social media anglers made a living off of targeting shark species from the beach. Most notably Elliot Sudal who went ultra-viral after a video of him landing a shark off a Nantucket beach made the rounds and he seized the moment, launching his social media page (@acksharks) and posting hundreds of impressive photos of surprisingly large sharks landed in broad daylight from the beaches of Massachusetts’ southernmost town.
At the time, I thought what was happening was that guys like Elliot were opening our eyes to a presence that was always there. But what I have seen since, suggests that these guys were just the first to capitalize on something much bigger. Warming waters? Changes in bait patterns? An anomalous spike in abundance? All of the above? Whatever the reason, the numbers of inshore sharks in New England waters have risen so sharply that they’ve gone from a kinda-cool-kinda-scary hot topic to a full-on problem in just 6 years’ time.
And that problem has continually escalated over those 6 years. Instances of depredation on hooked stripers has exploded during recent summers and each year it seems like it can’t get worse, and then it does. This year the sharks have been so bad during the second half of July that we’ve heard several reports from boats fishing around Block Island that the sharks were so thick that they were unable to land a single intact striper. Other reports said that the sharks have learned to associate the nighttime running lights of boats with a feeding opportunity and they will just line up around the boat and track it until a fish is hooked.
Over the last couple years we have seen an increase in other species of sharks as well. There have been several reports of great whites taking stripers near Cape Cod, there have been hammerheads in Rhode Island, threshers inshore around Fishers Island and Watch Hill and the supposedly rare and endangered sand tiger has also been showing up with increasing regularity. What has been a constant is the fact that southern New England can look to Long Island to see which species of shark are likely to become our next summer mainstay.
Over the last few years spinner and black tip sharks have become regular visitors in New York waters. Hammerheads are now showing up routinely in accidental catches, in fact Matt Broderick, our Long Island editor, told me caught and released two hammerheads last season alone. And now there have been documented catches of a few bull sharks from the western reaches of Long Island’s south shore. As a surfcaster, I really don’t like that one.
Perhaps the worst part is the timing. With 7 years of poor spawns of striped bass and more anglers than ever before targeting these fish, catching summer stripers in the areas where the sharks are most prominent – eastern Long Island Sound, Montauk, Block Island, Newport, Woods Hole and beyond – has become an ethics nightmare. When the sharks are thick, that 9% assumed mortality rate goes way up, and if your hooked fish are being repeatedly chopped in half, and you refuse to move, the blood of those stripers is on your hands, not the shark’s.
Brown sharks are the – far and away – leaders in the depredation of striped bass. NOAA still lists the brown shark (aka sandbar shark) as overfished with a rebuild goal of 2070! If they’re seriously going to rebuild this stock for another 44 years, there won’t be a striper left on the East Coast!
Fifteen years ago, I had never seen a brown shark in the flesh, now I can’t get away from the things! That would seem to be a sign that the stock has recovered… I’m interested in what comes next, and I doubt I have 44 years to wait!
