In a summer season that’s included Jersey bull sharks, surf-caught tiger sharks, and, most recently, a white shark that dragged a lifeguard underwater in Maine, why not add a surf-caught hammerhead to the mix.
With all the brown sharks around Rhode Island this season, Russ Mack has been using a wire leader when using eels for stripers to give himself a fighting chance at getting his hardware back when a brown beats the bass to a bait. On a recent outing, he hooked up on an eel, and immediately knew it wasn’t a striper. As the fight wore on, he must have begun to question whether it was a brown shark.
It took 2.5 hours to get the fish close enough to ID, at which point, they saw it was a hammerhead shark. Mack’s Instagram post called it scalloped hammerhead, which makes it an even rarer catch.
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There are three types of hammerheads that can range into Northeast waters, the massive great hammerhead, the smooth, and the scalloped. The range of scalloped hammerheads rarely extends past New Jersey, but sightings have been increasing in recent years, with researchers citing warming waters as the cause. Just last month, the Atlantic Shark Institute tagged a scalloped hammerhead, the first for the institute, off Block Island. Smooth hammerheads are much more common in the Northeast, and are regularly seen by tuna fishermen offshore of New England. One was even caught by striper fishermen in Moriches Inlet back in June. Hammerheads of any species in the New England surf are extraordinarily rare, but not completely unheard of. In 2022, a hammerhead shark was filmed eating bluefish in the Nantucket surf.
As for the Rhode Island surf hammer, Mack and his friends quickly unhooked and released it as the latest surprising catch in a very sharky summer.
