Article by Capt. Franky Pettolina
It was the summer of 1985. One of those rare weekend days when the “Last Call” didn’t have a charter. I was in the fighting chair locked in to a dead heat standoff with a tuna that was being extra persnickety. And it was raining.
Twenty minutes earlier, I was sitting in the salon of the boat having some sort of heated debate with my friend Blaine. I don’t remember the topic. To be honest, back in the day (with credit to my good friend Capt. Mark Sampson’s recent column) Blaine and I weren’t the best of friends. Yes, we would spend most every waking moment together. His Dad and my Dad worked together and were very good friends. We were around each other all the time. Friends might have been a bit of an exaggeration though. After all, he was 8 and I was 11. He may have been 9. Boys will be boys. We scrapped more than a bit. I am glad to say that we both grew up and grew close over the years. To say friends now might not even be correct though. More like brothers. Anyways, we were in a heated debate right about the time the right outrigger bait came out of the clip and line started peeling off of the reel. We both ran out to the fighting chair and a shoving match ensued. I had both a weight and height advantage, so I ended up in the chair fighting the fish.
As I was soaking wet from the rain and getting my butt kicked by the tuna, I am not sure I truly won the battle to get in the chair. Yes, I was in the chair, but Blaine was inside, and dry, and his arms were not burning. Jay, Blaine’s Dad, was telling my Dad that he saw the bite and the fish didn’t look that big so he couldn’t figure out why I was having such a tough time getting it in. For another twenty minutes the battle was a true tug of war. I would get a few inches. The fish would take a few back. Jay kept saying that it wasn’t that big of a fish.
Then all of a sudden I could gain line like crazy. I cranked the fish right to the boat. When the tuna broke the surface it was obvious what had been happening. The water was dyed red with blood and the yellowfin had a big chunk of its backside missing in the perfect outline of a mako shark’s mouth. That was the first time I ever had the “taxman” demand payment of one of my fish.
The next time I was taxed was in Venezuela in 1997. We were fighting our third blue marlin of the day. Steve, the angler, was in good shape and was using great technique, but the fish was just whooping him. After an hour, we had him harnessed to the rod and things were really at a stalemate. Blaine’s dad was running the boat and I had a weird sense of Déjà vu when he kept saying that he saw the fish on the bite and that it was not any bigger than the other fish we had encountered that day. Both of those had been released in a half hour or less.
About two and a half hours into the fight, Steve started winding like mad and we all thought the fish had got away. There was hardly any bend in the rod. Steve kept saying that he felt something on the line. When the leader came up I grabbed it and pulled what was left of our blue marlin into the boat. Nothing but tail! That’s right. The fish had somehow been foul hooked in the tail and a shark, or sharks, had taken the rest. I put the tail in our freezer and Steve later had a mount made of it. Complete with shark bite marks.
That following summer, I caught the largest yellowfin I have ever caught in Ocean City. At the time it was one of the biggest ever caught in Ocean City. That has changed since then, but it still remains an awesome catch. The fish weighed 144 lbs. and was caught on a dink rod (30 lb. test) with 60 lb. leader. It was an epic struggle, taking my angler 4 hours to land the beast. On this particular trip, my Dad was running the boat and I was splitting cockpit duties with my old mate Joey. The first time the leader came on to the rod was at the three and a half hour mark. Joey and I could both see the long streamer fins so we knew it was a big yellowfin (we had been thinking bigeye). We picked up our gaffs. The fish was ours. Until it ran out over half of the spool again. The entire boat was dumbfounded. The fish had that much energy left after that much time on the hook!?!? Just like the other times I have dealt with sharks, however, as soon as the long run stopped there was a bit of a tug and then the angler was able to crank the fish right to the boat. Unlike the other times though, this time the fish was in tact with just a few teeth marks where the mako had grabbed it. The bite marks were bleeding, but no meat was gone. We got lucky I guess. Well we did, the big yellowfin not so much.
In the first twenty years of my sportfishing career those were the only times I ever had sharks take fish from me while we were fighting them. Maybe I just was fortunate enough not to be fishing in shark infested areas. I don’t know. But I never really heard much about it from other boats either. In the last 15 years that has been changing.
I started noticing that we had a heck of a lot more sharks showing up while we were tuna fishing down in the Washington Canyon about 8 or 10 years ago. Put sharks around struggling tunas that are hindered by hooks and lines and there is only one outcome. The sharks get their snacks and we get “taxed!” It gets so bad some days that we don’t even bother trying to catch the tunas. We just troll away and look for other stuff.
This past winter I have been following the fishing pages on social media from the boats in South Florida. Darn near every day there were pictures or videos of snappers and sailfish that had been sharked while they were being brought in. The captains down there were saying that it has really become a nuisance.
Just yesterday I saw a picture on one of my North Carolina buddy’s Facebook pages of a mess of bonito and skipjacks. The caption said that they had a bunch of yellowfin bites too, but couldn’t get them past the “Taxman”.
I get it, sharks gotta eat too. But the fact that this is becoming more and more common raises some questions in my mind. Are sharks just in an upward swing in their population cycle? Have they learned our fishing habits and how to capitalize on them? I don’t know the answer. I do know that in the past few years the regulations on both commercial and recreational shark fishing have been made tighter (don’t get me started on how asinine the new mako retention limits are for recreational anglers. NMFS should be ashamed for coming up with such nonsense). I spoke to someone in fishery management the other day and he told me that the science tells us that shark populations are low. From what I am seeing this can’t be true. Maybe the sharks have just become more adept at avoiding the scientists.
The first tunas of the Ocean City season were caught a couple of weeks ago and it was great to see the the first mako and thresher hit the scale as well. It will be interesting to see how the season goes for both sharks and tunas. Being a diehard Conservative, I can only hope that we don’t get “taxed” too bad in the canyons this summer. Maybe I should send a tweet out to our Commander in Chief and see if I can get some offshore tax cuts proposed.
Capt Franky Pettolina is Co-Captain of the charter boat, “Last Call” which is docked at the Ocean City Fishing Center, owner of Pettolina Marine Surveying, Inc. and multi-term President of the Ocean City Marlin Club.
