Demon Fish (12 page)

The shark has done the captain’s advertising for him. “People ask me why I hang them up,” he says. “That’s why I hang them up. If you let them go, you don’t have anything. You almost don’t have a story.”

If you’re looking for a twenty-first-century incarnation of Captain Quint from
Jaws
, Quartiano comes pretty close. While he’s a friendlier, more service-oriented version, the Florida charter-boat captain has built his entire professional reputation on his ability to slay the scariest sharks in the sea. The shift in public attitudes toward sharks, driven in large part by the success of
Jaws
, has helped propel an entire commercial industry in the United States that spans from the dock to the drugstore.

Quartiano used to hunt sharks for his own amusement off Miami Beach, but he’s spent most of his career ensuring other anglers can tell their own big-fish stories. He started out working as a police officer and then became a firefighter, at which point he managed to work four days a week and fish the other three days. Once he cobbled together enough sponsors to support himself by fishing full-time, he made the switch, and at this point he’s the only charter operator who still targets sharks. By his own estimate, he has killed at least 100,000 sharks over the course of his career: as he likes to joke, he’s outlasted his competitors, as well as the scores of sharks he’s hauled on board over the years.

Quartiano models himself in part after the shark hunters who used to fish off Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s—when there were still plenty of sharks around to catch—though he’s quick to add that he manages to accomplish the same feats in a much less forgiving environment. After William E. Young toured the globe in the early twentieth century in search of sharks, men like the late Frank Mundus grabbed the spotlight. Mundus earned the nickname Monster Man for the sharks he caught off Montauk, and claimed he was the inspiration for Captain Quint, even though Benchley said he based the character on more than one person. Mundus caught two massive great whites in the course of his forty-year career, but embraced conservation after years of fishing, retired to Hawaii in 1991, and largely gave up shark hunting. Quartiano, however, has yet to temper his pursuit.

Quartiano prides himself on finding new species to kill in order to satisfy his customer, like the thresher sharks he’s managed to cull from a nearby area where they gather to give birth to their young. He no longer is allowed to catch threshers under state law, which complicates this task. While he’s careful to adhere to state and federal rules, he thinks people apply a double standard when it comes to shark fishing. “You get people who don’t like to hurt animals but they’re mostly hypocrites,” Quartiano once told a local magazine. “They want to release everything, meanwhile they go home and eat big juicy steaks.”

Quartiano cannot be called a hypocrite: he lets people know exactly where he stands. He parks his boat right outside one of Miami’s big South Beach hotels, perched next to a black-and-white sandwich-board sign that extols the virtues of “Mark the Shark’s Monster Fishing Charters.” (These claims to fame apparently include “awarded #1 charter boat in the world” and “as seen on every major t.v. show,” both of which seem like a slight stretch.) The tiny beachcomber shop he runs is yards away, and its walls are lined with at least a hundred shark jaws. “This is nothing, I’ve got a warehouse full of them,” he explains as I marvel at the dry, jagged teeth looming above me.

Mark the Shark looks the part: he wears sunny yellow fishermen’s overalls that are both practical and symbolic, evoking America’s fishing past, along with various items of clothing that tout his many sponsors. For example, his T-shirt’s slogan, “Just Stuff It,” is a subtle advertisement for Gray Taxidermy, which helps immortalize his clients’ catches. Ironically, taxidermists don’t even use the shark’s carcass anymore to make a mount. An angler comes in, tells the shop the species and size of the shark that’s perished, and the staff takes down a Plexiglas model that matches. It’s cheaper and more efficient, though it means losing some authenticity in the process. Some trophies still feature a shark’s actual jaws, but that’s the only physical remnant of the animal that has been dragged up from the ocean’s depths. The carcass is discarded; the shark has died for no ostensible purpose.

While Quartiano and I are discussing the fine details of taxidermy, we’re idling in his office waiting for customers to show up that were expected shortly after dawn. A British stag party was slated to arrive at 7:00 a.m. to start fishing; now it’s more than two hours later and they’re still lounging, hungover, in their Ritz-Carlton hotel rooms. We’ve been informed that they won’t arrive until 11:30; there is no choice but to accede to their wishes. Quartiano charges a party of six $1,200 for a daylong ride, and so long as they’ve paid their money, he does what they want. The charter captain wouldn’t have minded sleeping in as well, but that is not his call—he reports first thing in the morning and shoves off only when his customers arrive.

Finally, shortly before noon, a collection of five amiable, pasty-faced Brits arrives at the marina. Quartiano’s focused on pleasing his customers, not giving them a guilt trip, so he’s acting more like a camp counselor than anything else. “We’re going to do shark fishing, so everyone who wants to catch a shark, come with me!” he announces cheerily. Most boat tours that last more than a couple of hours offer plenty of food to their customers, but Quartiano makes it clear that’s not an option today. “We only have liquids: beer, soda, water. No food,” he warns them. “That’s fine,” one of the Brits replies.

Quartiano is just as clear on who will be the focus of his attention this April afternoon: Michael Sandford, the bachelor boy. Just as Stephanie Perez takes center stage when she’s paying the bill, Michael Sandford is the one who gets special treatment this time. “Michael’s the man,” Quartiano declares. Being “the man” means catching a shark, of course, so the two men running the boat arrange it so Sandford will be sitting at the gleaming white chair on the main deck, where he will be able to haul in the big fish on a black shiny rod with a golden reel. “Once you’re in the chair, baby, it’s hard to get out,” Quartiano tells the group.

Sandford, who is getting married in less than a month, is fascinated by the possibility of catching a big fish. “How big can you go?” he asks Quartiano. “We’ve got a bunch of world records,” the tour operator answers, with his usual braggadocio. “Any shark that swims, I can kill.”

This sort of talk is a big hit with Sandford and his friends, all of whom are stock traders and real estate developers in their late thirties and early forties. Their Miami trip is a way to escape overcast English skies and their work responsibilities for a long weekend. Much of their trip has consisted of golfing and drinking, but Sandford likes going fishing, so they figure a trip with Mark the Shark can’t hurt. Of course, Sandford adds, fishing on his side of the Atlantic has gotten a lot harder in recent years. “They’re getting pretty scarce at home, fish,” he says.

As they pull out of the marina, the boat’s sound system blasts a song Quartiano saves for groups like this: Dick Pickle’s “South Beach, the Official Anthem.” Singing to the tune of
The Sound of Music
’s “My Favorite Things,” Pickle croons about everything from silicone implants to celebrities:

Jews in Mercedes and nipples with rings
South Beach has all of my favorite things
.

Several of the Brits chuckle. Quartiano knows his clientele well. His average customer, he says, is “a guy all pumped up, a big-game guy, kind of macho … I don’t have too many Greenpeace folks coming on my boat. Usually, it’s guys wanting to kill something.”

Tim O’Hare, Quartiano’s mate on this particular day, focuses on baiting the hooks rather than on the chatter that swirls around him on the boat as the Brits get comfortable. If Quartiano is the entertainer, O’Hare is the workhorse: he just wants to make sure these novices catch a shark, so they can declare victory and head for shore. But he relishes the struggle it takes to haul one of them into the boat. “These sharks are more exciting than any other fish. They’re harder to catch,” he says, as he handles the squid that will theoretically lure one of them to the boat. “It’s the fight, and then just the nature of the animal.”

O’Hare is well aware of monster fishing’s detractors: like Quartiano, he sees these critics—especially those who call upon fishermen to “catch and release” their prey—as two-faced. “People call us slaughterers, murderers. We’re just not hypocrites. Most of these fish, if you catch and release them, they’re going to die.” O’Hare has a point—many sport fish hauled up to the surface after a struggle end up dying anyway, depending on the duration of the battle, the given biology of a specific species, the wounds inflicted on the animal, and other factors. But most sharks can survive being dragged to the surface if they’re let go quickly enough. Since they lack swim bladders, sharks are not vulnerable to pressure changes like other fish. And fishermen can use gear that increases the shark’s chance of survival, including circle hooks that will lodge in its jaw rather than its gut, non-stainless-steel hooks that will rust out quickly rather than stay embedded for long periods of time, and a sufficiently strong line so that the person catching the shark doesn’t have to wage an extended battle to deliberately tire it out.

While O’Hare and Quartiano do everything possible to spoon-feed their clients, preparing the fishing rods, handling the sharks once they land on the boat, they also see some risks as inevitable. “There are a lot of close calls,” Quartiano confides. “You’re dealing with live sharks. These things are going to happen, but nothing like we need a tourniquet.”

Mark the Shark’s clients expend little effort pondering what it takes to catch a shark, but that’s because Quartiano and O’Hare have done the thinking for them. The boat is cruising along what Quartiano calls “the middle of a highway”: it is a two-hundred-yard transect most of the fish follow as they move along the Gulf Stream, where they are easy prey. The two fishermen put the bait on lines of varying depth, at times dropping down as far as fifteen hundred or two thousand feet in order to lure six-gill sharks, which have six gills on each side rather than five and prefer deeper water. By covering the entire water column, they increase the chances that high-paying clients such as Sandford will manage to hook something while sitting in the comfort of the captain’s chair, Budweiser in hand.

Which is what happens, by the end of the day. Sandford gets his hammerhead, and they catch one more for good measure. That’s another satisfied client who can return to London and his future bride with full bragging rights about his monster-fishing adventure in America.

Mark the Shark has to work harder now to please his customers than he did in the past, and he blames commercial fishermen who set longlines for his predicament. These fishing lines with baited hooks frequently end up tangling and killing sharks, and there’s no question that the sharks caught unintentionally from such activities, known as bycatch, far outnumber the targeted fish, be it tuna or swordfish.

“They’ve definitely gone down because of long-liners, not because of me,” he says of sharks. “We never touch a population. Those long-liners do more damage in a night than we do in a year.” And Quartiano simply does not believe that species such as bigeye thresher sharks are endangered, because he still hauls them in on his rod and reel. “I’ve caught more than anyone else on the planet. There’s no way they’re endangered.”

Data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service tell a different story: federal officials estimate that recreational landings of large coastal sharks outpaced commercial catches for fifteen out of twenty-one years between 1981 and 2001, with U.S. recreational anglers catching 12 million sharks, skates, and rays in 2004 alone.
¹
These numbers appear to be on the rise: the absolute number of sharks U.S. anglers caught increased by roughly a third between 2006 and 2007, according to NOAA.
²
Apparently, all those bachelor and bachelorette parties add up.

It’s a classic case of tunnel vision: humans fail to comprehend the massive impact of our collective activities on the planet because we think of ourselves as lone actors. In 2007, for example, twelve million anglers made nearly 87 million fishing trips on the Atlantic, Pacific, and gulf coasts, catching roughly 468 million fish.
³
That’s more than one fish for every man, woman, and child in the United States, and then some. Boris Worm, the marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University, puts it another way: “Say you have only one in a thousand Americans catch a shark each year. That’s 300,000 sharks a year, just like that. I don’t think we understand how many of us there are.” We dwarf every other large animal on earth in terms of numbers, and that has consequences.

On a certain level, Quartiano acknowledges that he might be contributing to the fish’s demise, though he still sees long-liners as the enemy. “In terms of the numbers of sharks we’ve killed, nobody comes close to us. We’ve caught just about everything there is left to catch. Sharks are fascinating, but we’re trophy hunters. I get paid to kill fish. Some people don’t like it, but too bad.” If environmentalists have such a big problem with his activities, he reasons, they should pay him to park his boat. In an era of government bailouts, Quartiano jokes, he’s happy to take his place in line at the federal trough. “Basically, my ultimate goal is to get subsidized by the government. They pay farmers not to farm, right? I want to get paid not to fish.”

Despite his bravado, Quartiano has been feeling a little uneasy lately about his activities. He wants sharks to stick around long enough for his son Maverick—whom he describes as “fearless”—to kill them. So he’s been bringing some of his catches back to local scientists, which he says more than justifies his business. “How else are you going to get data on some species of sharks unless [sic] we don’t bring them to the scientists?” he asks, adding that it’s no use throwing sharks back into the sea if they’ve died by the time they’re hauled into the boat. “This is how they’re going to get them. They may not like it. They’re specimens. Like it or not, we’re going to catch ’em. If we catch an endangered species, why should we let it sink to the bottom?”