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Falling in Love with a Killer Slicing through the waters that brought you the beast that inspired Jaws, Montauk’s shark hunters search the Atlantic for their cold-blooded, man-eating prey. It’s the brutal Mako Mania tournament, where old salts and paying customers harry a dying breed of monsters. Where the stakes are huge, the sharks are bigger, and the fishing is absolutely to die for. By Stephen Rinella
Beneath me, in the boat's cockpit, Rocko Cole is performing his primary duty as first mate: He's laying out the chum line, a miles-long slick of fish blood, shredded fish flesh, and little bits of fish gut. For what he calls "surface effect," Rocko has included a decorative assortment of candy wrappers, a cardboard box, cigarette butts, and an empty Starbucks Frappuccino bottle. With a fillet knife, he begins mincing a three-pound, half-dead bluefish. Every minute or so he flings a scoop of the bloody soup over his left shoulder into the ocean. Rocko's knife-working arm has a tattoo of a dagger slicing through a heart that says "Kathy." Up on the bow, Captain Michael Potts is wearing a blue flannel shirt, and his tan corduroys are jacked up over his rounded belly by thick suspenders. He's 47 and has a short, solid build, a mustache, a set of aviator shades, and a white sun visor with tufts of black hair shooting above its band. He's releasing a small black kite into the wind while explaining why he decided to bring us to this particular spot of ocean. The answer to that riddle includes a temperature break created by an eddy of warm Gulf Stream water spinning in a band of cooler coastal water. There are three clients on board: an intense, middle-aged New Jersey businessman with reddish hair, and his two college-aged sons. The father is talking nonstop, trying to convince his sons that fishing is exciting—I get the feeling that this trio has been on a lot of father-inspired outings—but both boys are fast asleep in the deck chairs. Son number one has the short, bleached, combed-forward hair that typifies violence-prone suburban youth; son number two is conservatively groomed in a way that suggests he's overshadowed by his younger brother. From the captain's chair of the Blue Fin IV, I scan the technology at my fingertips: GPS, two marine radios with scramblers, a cell phone, a radar screen, and a chromoscope. We're drifting at three miles per hour in a north-northwest direction over 240 feet of water, 25 miles south of Montauk Harbor, Long Island. The water temperature is 68 degrees, warming slightly. What I can't tell from these instruments, though, is the one thing Captain Potts, Rocko, and the New Jersey businessman want to know: Is there a mako shark around here that is big enough to take the pot in Star Island Yacht Club's Mako Mania shark-hunting tournament? To answer this question, we keep chummin'. What we do have circling us are blue sharks. I'm surprised they hang around after learning that we're a custom built, diesel-powered, 41-foot wooden sportfishing vessel and not a dead, bloated whale. There are four or five of them, each longer and heavier than a full-grown man, with iridescent indigo backs and long pectoral fins that make them look like underwater fighter planes. The sharks run their dorsal fins out of the water, then melt away into the depths only to return out of nowhere to chomp into the teaser, a 40-pound yellowfin tuna carcass hanging over the side of the boat on a cable. Rocko grabs the line and yanks it away from them like he's pulling a shoe from a poodle. Blues weigh up to 450 pounds, but they're not what Potts is after today, and he regards them as a gardener would a weed infestation. This tournament pays out only for the much less common short-finned makos. Weighing up to a thousand pounds and traveling at speeds of 30 miles per hour, makos can actually leap out of the water, and they're the only known predators of swordfish and marlin. Scientists have documented them attacking humans with a calculated method called "repeated bump and bite," which doesn't make me very keen on the idea of falling in. But seeing one at all in these waters is rare, as years of commercial fishing, shark tournaments, and by-catch (when sharks are killed in nets or on lines set for other species) have reduced all shark populations in the North Atlantic by 50 to 80 percent since the early 1970s. Despite fewer sharks and increasingly strict recreational-fishing regulations (currently one shark per boat per day, and it must be longer than 4.5 feet), shark hunting is still a popular pursuit around Long Island. This is Star Island Yacht Club's ninth annual two-day tournament, and there are 30 participating boats, none of which is anywhere in sight. So we chum and wait. Potts decides not to set any hooks until the blue sharks clear out. He doesn't want to sacrifice his tackle and live bait to the blues, which doesn't please the New Jersey businessman. He chartered this boat for the tournament, and he wants some goddamn hooks in the water. His two sons, now awake, giggle nervously, trying to gauge the seriousness of this dispute between their old man and the captain. I pass the time grappling with a fisherman's identity crisis I've been having out here on the water. One minute I imagine us a group of friendly outdoorsmen, honoring our primordial desire to fish while we contribute to the local economy. The next minute, I think, we're nothing but machismo afloat, looking to kill another member of an already depleted species for a cash prize and local notoriety while littering the ocean and burning up volumes of diesel fuel. Be patient, Potts says. Rocko ladles out another scoop of chum and lights up a smoke.
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