Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
One Stupid Sharker
Among all the political nonsense going on these days is the fact that no matter what the office, or who it is that's running for it, a candidate is sure to dig back to the ice age if necessary to find any kind of dirt they might be able to use to discredit their opponent in the minds of anyone who might be inclined to cast a legitimate or even illegitimate votes their way. But the political wolves are shrewd and have good noses, if there's dirt out there they'll find it.
I know this might come as a shock to some of you but I'm not going to run for president this year. There's a guy running for the job that proved a few years back that he can do an excellent job of it so I've decided to throw my full support his way and that's that. But in preparation of a potential run in future years I'm thinking I should take a preemptive approach and expose for myself a big skeleton that still lurks in my closet before someone else does it and ruins my chances of winning an election. So I'm going to air out my dirty laundry now and let the chips (and future votes) fall where they may.
To really know the gravity of my dark past you have to understand that I've spent most of my life making a living by taking people out on the ocean to fish for sharks with a strong emphasis on conservation, education, and research. In my own defense, let me also point out that it wasn’t until the early 90’s that there were any shark regulations at all, and the following story is from a time that predates that, so while a lot of what we did was stupid, at the time it was at least “legal”.
When I was a kid, sand tigers were very abundant but not very well understood sharks that were a common catch over most of the nearshore wrecks and shoals for anglers who wanted to tangle with them. But since most anglers didn’t want to tangle with them, it wasn’t too often they’d be seen back at the dock. My first introduction to sand tigers is when myself and a couple friends ran up to Fenwick Shoal one morning and caught six of the 7-8 foot critters. It was the late 70’s and with everyone still whacked out over the movie JAWS there wasn’t a lot of catch-and-release going on with sharks so we caught six and we brought home six.
Back then I was fishing out of a 19-foot center console which wasn’t too accommodating for three angers and six sharks. While fishing we’d catch one, get a rope around its tail and tie it to the side of the boat like a big boat bumper. As the shark tally began to rise we realized that we couldn’t tie them too close together because they were all still alive and when they touched they’d start thrashing around and biting each other, so we had to space them out around the boat three to a side. When it was time to run back we transferred them all to the back of the boat and started towing but they created so much drag that when we realized that the 12-mile ride was going to take us hours we elected to bring the sharks aboard.
So we precariously loaded six (yeah six!) 6-8 foot (still alive) sand tigers in my 19-foot boat and somehow managed to get back without mishap. At the time we thought the “oohs and ahhs” we heard back at the dock came from a crowd gathered to see the mighty fishermen and the savage beasts they slayed. Thinking back about that now I'm guessing the crowd was more in awe of the fact that three stupid kids would be stupid enough to go out in a boat and actually bring back six big sharks in a single trip.
Despite being an idiot back then I did at least hold firmly to my father's “you kill it - you eat it” conviction so six sand tigers were cleaned and became a pile of meat on the docks of Bahia Marina the likes of which have never been seen before or probably ever will be again. I'm guessing that if I were to dig deep enough into my freezer I could still come up with a few packs of 1970-something sand tiger steaks.
Of course the meat wasn't all we harvested from our slaughter that day as each unfortunate victim had a set of dentures we wanted to hang on our apartment walls. Since I had yet to learn the proper method for cleaning and preserving shark jaws, I took the advice of the first fool willing to talk to me and boiled the jaws in a big pot of Drano drain cleaner!
Now I don't know exactly what chemical concoction goes into the making of Drano or what kind of toxic gasses it gives out when it’s heated to its boiling point, but I'm pretty certain the greenish steam rising from the pot is not something you want to get a whiff of, and the only reason I'm alive to tell this story is because I at least had the smarts to boil the jaw on a grill out on the beach and not in the kitchen where I'm certain the fumes would have pitted all the metal appliances and melted the paint from the walls.
When the charcoal finally went out and the cauldron cooled to where we could get close enough to knock it off the grill and onto the sand with a long stick, we saw that the Drano had ineed dissolved away all the meat and other glop from the jaws. Unfortunately it also totally dissolved the jaws as well leaving nothing but a large pile of teeth in the sand.
As it was by then about three in the morning we decided to come back in the daylight to collect the teeth, giving the sand time to cool and the green steam to dissipate. Unfortunately by the time we returned it was well into a busy summer morning on the beach and there were people everywhere. Everywhere that is except one big patch of green smelly sand that for some reason no beach-goers wanted to go near or even be down wind of. As the tide had already moved enough sand around that the teeth were covered up anyway, we figured that rather than running the risk of getting in some kind of trouble with the EPA, DNR, or SPCA, our best bet was just to slip on out of there and be content with a handful of teeth and a few hundred pounds of not so delicious sand tiger meat in our freezers.
To this day, every time I hear that someone found a shark’s tooth on the beach I can't help but wonder if it wasn't one of ours. So now that I've come clean about my past I'm ready to start my campaign for the 2028 election. I'll probably kick it off with a big fish fry party - I've got some shark steaks in the freezer I need to get rid of… §
