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Shark tournament a thrashing success
by Jason Dietrich
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"Goat II" skipper Tom Brooks Jr., (left) and family show off their first place 383-pound Mako. Photo by Smitty Smith. |
Last Saturday, 60 fishermen rose before the sun, pointed their bows west and went hunting for one of ocean's fiercest fish.
The 2nd Annual Invitational Mako Shark Tournament brought some of the area's best shark hunters to Redondo Beach's King Harbor for the weekend event. The first place prize, an all-expenses-paid fishing trip to Alaska, went to Tom Brooks, the captain of "Goat 2." His prize-winning catch tipped the scales at 383.5 pounds. This wasn't Brooks's biggest fish -- one day last year he hauled in a 986-pound mako -- but it has been the best this summer.
"I've had a slow year, I figure I'm due," said Brooks prophetically at the pre-tournament meeting.
Second place went to Darrell "Smitty" Smith who reeled in a 203-pound mako. Pat Parkhurst took third with a 136-pound shark. Mako sharks have to weigh at least 65 pounds to be considered for the tournament. The 15 boats that went out hooked a total of 31 fish, but only 6 were kept. This year, anglers snared 22 blue sharks, which were also released. Compared with last year, this year's tournament went swimmingly. Only one legal fish, an 80.5-pounder, was landed during the tournament's first year.
Proceeds from the two-day tournament go to the "Let's go fishing foundation" which takes boatloads of disadvantaged children and their parents out for a day of fishing. This year the event raised $1,600 for the charitable organization.
"We're very proud of what we've done in very short period of time. We're able to do two more trips thanks to the fishermen and the local community support," said tournament organizer Barry Andersen.
Man vs. fish
Shark hunters are a secretive group. While they'll bend ears by the hour talking about their last catch or the one that got away, when the topic of favorite fishing spots comes up, conversation screeches to a halt.
"You get a little info from here, another tip from there, and then you just start throwing chum in the water and hope you get something big enough," said Bob Woods. This is Woods' first shark hunting tournament. While he's tried to hook a shark several times this summer, he still hasn't gotten one on board. To remind himself and his crew that even little sharks can be dangerous (and there are sharks bigger than his 34-foot boat "Huh-dad" in the water), he brought along a copy of the movie "Jaws."
Mako sharks don't have much of a reputation as man-eaters, Andersen commented. But even medium-sized sharks are dangerous, said Gary Moore of Torrance. They've been known to thrash their way into a boat's cockpit.
"They're one of the most aggressive fish in the ocean. If you look at the boats that have seen a lot of shark fishing, most of them have teeth marks all along the swim-step. Some of them even have bite marks on the inside," Moore said.
As easy as fishing
Despite their size and power, as fish go, sharks are rather primitive. Their simple, stripped-down design has been so successful, millions of years of evolution have not knocked them out of the top tier of the ocean's food chain.
But there are drawbacks to working with organs that developed millions of years before apes descended from the trees. A Mako shark doesn't have the proper muscles to fan water through its gills as other fish do. So it has to swim forward constantly to push water through its gills.
Since Mako sharks do not stop to sleep, neither do the shark hunters. Mako sharks usually feed on bonito and mackerel between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m. and shark fishers spend most of the night in pursuit of their catch. The King Harbor contest is Southern California's only all-night shark tournament.
Shark fishers started out Saturday morning looking for clear blue water, particularly where waters of two different temperatures meet.
Once they've reached their spot, the fishermen start a chum circle. Bits and pieces of fish are tossed overboard in a spiral that eventually leads to the anglers' hooks, which are baited with mackerel.
After they've hooked a shark, fishermen try to bring it close enough to the boat to discover if it is big enough to keep and from the species they are hunting.
"If it's too small or a (blue shark), we just cut the line and off it goes. After a few weeks the hook rusts out and there's nothing left," said one contestant who came down from Oxnard with the crew of "Gramps Hatts" for the tournament.
Anglers fishing for shark outside tournament rules have been known to dispatch their catch in innovative ways, shooting hooked sharks with a gun, bringing them alongside a boat and beating them with baseball bats, or spearing them through the nose and tail with long hooks and then decapitating them, said shark fisher Sean Battaglia.
But tournament shark fishers are required to kill their sharks by lassoing the shark's tail, usually after it has been brought up against the back of the boat, and dragging it behind. Water is forced through the fish's gills in reverse, and the shark suffocates.
Fish tales
Whether or not they bring back a prize-winning fish, shark hunters return to harbor with great stories. Andersen, for instance, said his boat almost brought in the catch of the day. Four years ago Andersen caught a 740-pound shark, the biggest that had been hauled in locally in 10 years. About 6 p.m. Saturday, the crew of the "Huh-dad 2" was looking for big fish around the west end of Catalina Island, when Bernard "Skeeter" DuBois felt a tug on his line. A big tug. But as he played out the line, he had no idea how big.
"He had hooked a thousand-pounder. It was at least 13-feet long," said Andersen.
In the first half-hour the shark jumped 15 or 20 feet in the air five times, Andersen said. The crew fought it for five and a half hours, covering eight and a half miles, in reverse. Once a shark is hooked, anglers follow the direction of their fishing rods, trying to prevent the line from snapping but also trying to tire the fish out. Shirley Andersen kept the boat right on the shark's tail through the night. Though the first 15 or 20 feet of line of a shark fishing rig is steel cable, the rest is 60- or 80-pound test monofilament that a big shark could snap easily if the line was allowed to go taut.
At 11:32 p.m. the shark dove under the boat, tangling the line on the boat's propeller, and broke free.
"We did everything by the book, but this time the fish won. It was just an exceptional fight," Andersen said, adding that a shark that had grown to be that size was probably between 18 and 25 years old and have learned a thing or two to have survived that long.
Until next time at least, it'll have to be the one that got away.ER