White Sharks on Cape Cod

Pictured Above: Jamie Costa of Columbia Sportfishing holds the head of a bass after a close encounter with a white shark.

An unconscious man is carried from the water, gushing blood. Beachgoers frantically try to stop the bleeding from his legs—first with a towel, then the leash from his boogie board, finally with a dog leash.

Though multiple 911 calls go out, there is initially no one to help. (Many will later say they couldn’t get cell reception at the remote Cape Cod National Seashore beach.) Agonizing minutes pass. The crowd forms a makeshift stretcher to carry the young man up to the parking lot, where an ambulance has arrived. He dies on the way to Cape Cod Hospital.

Last September, Arthur Medici, a 26-year-old from Revere, Massachusetts, became the second person attacked in a month and the first shark fatality in Massachusetts since 1936.

For the past decade, as shark sightings increased along outer Cape beaches, most scientists said it wasn’t a question of “if” a fatal shark attack would happen, it was a matter of “when.”
Now, the question is, can we prevent it from happening again?

The transformation of Cape Cod into Shark City, USA, was sudden and unexpected. Known hotspots for white shark activity are off California and South Africa, not off The Beachcomber. As recently as 2004, the sighting of a juvenile white shark in a Falmouth estuary created near-daily newspaper headlines – that’s how rare it was.

Anyone who has watched Shark Week for more than ten minutes knows that sharks don’t want to eat people and are instead looking for seals. They’ve come to the right place—Cape Cod is seal country. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates there are 30,000 to 50,000 gray seals around the coast of southeastern Massachusetts compared to just 11,000 in 2005.

There is a jaw-dropping video posted on YouTube that spotter pilot Aaron Knight shot in April 2016. As the plane flies low over Monomoy, seemingly endless numbers of seals are seen lolling on the sands near the water.

It’s an all-you-can-eat-buffet for apex predators.

“Every day,” says Captain Hap Ferrell.

Watch Here: White shark takes striped bass.

He’s talking about great white sharks snatching hooked striped bass off fishermen’s lines in Cape Cod Bay. “One or two a day, and that’s in a fleet of ten boats,” says Ferrell, meaning his fellow charter boats out of Rock Harbor, Orleans.

Ferrell has been chartering for 40 years and fished commercially before that. In the early 1970s, he was tending bar nights at the Land Ho in Orleans and jigging cod off the back side by day. Even at 14 cents a pound, he could make over a hundred bucks—not a bad day’s pay at a time when the federal minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. “Then cod prices went down, and gas prices went up,” says Ferrell, who found that by taking sport fishermen out on charter trips, “You get paid before you leave the dock.”
In summer 2017, Ferrell captured an amazing sight on video: a juvenile great white about 9 feet long (that had already ripped a good-sized keeper bass down to the gill plate) jumps completely out of the water, perhaps ten feet from the transom of Ferrell’s boat, a 36-foot Harris, and lands with a crashing splash. The video was widely circulated on social media and was even posted on the Boston Globe’s website.

Click Here to Read More About Spotting White Sharks

Wayne Bergeron, captain of the Janine B out of Sesuit, cites a rock to the west of the Sesuit jetties that appears to be attracting more sharks, including a 13-footer that seems to have taken up residence.

Bergeron, who runs a 550 Cummins diesel on his boat, thinks the sharks are learning that the telltale vibrations of charter boats means fish are near – most of the charter fleet favor diesel engines. It’s unclear why hooked stripers taken off lines by great whites happens more in Cape Cod Bay than off the back side, but there are theories.

Partly, juvenile whites (and this is a relative term because I’m still talking about an 8- to 12-foot toothy predator) aren’t big enough to go after a 500-pound gray seal. Part of it is biomechanical—white sharks’ dentition changes when they are about 9 feet long. Their teeth fall out and are replaced throughout their life, but at that length, they begin to change from longer, sharper teeth that are good for biting into and through fish to more serrated-edge teeth, better suited to ripping out hunks of blubber off seals and dead whales, their preferred diet in the open ocean.

But, they certainly have taken plenty of stripers off the back side, too.

Captain Austin Proudfoot, a Chatham native, runs North Chatham Outfitters and has spent many years running charters from here to Florida. Two years ago, he had an up-close-and-all-too-personal visit from a great white. He was fishing off Nauset Beach when a hooked striper he was landing got snapped in half by a juvenile white.

“It wasn’t much bigger than about eight feet,” said Proudfoot, but the experience was nonetheless startling. “I had the bass by the diamond jig,” said Proudfoot, meaning his hand was not far from the shark’s jaws.

Great white sharks in Cape waters is the new reality.

Even after 33 years on the job, Greg Skomal, Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, still gets excited when he talks about sharks.
Skomal calls sharks “charismatic megafauna,” and he has likely spent more time observing white sharks in the Atlantic Ocean than any man alive.

He and his staff are currently crunching the numbers after a recently completely five-year population study. For even longer, he’s been tagging sharks with acoustic and satellite-linked tags, which tell us some things about a white’s behavior.

Acoustic tags, which last up to 10 years, broadcast an identifying signal (a “ping”) whenever a shark swims within 100 to 200 yards of buoys equipped with receivers. The buoys are scattered across Massachusetts waters, and satellite-linked tags relay broad-scale, three-dimensional movement data. The information from the acoustic and satellite-linked tags tells researchers a shark’s position in the water, swimming speed, direction, even pitch and roll. Things the tags cannot tell us include how long sharks live, where they breed, or what happens when they die. We don’t know how many months a shark gestates or exactly when it reaches sexual maturity. No one has seen a white shark mate or give birth. We don’t know how many white sharks there are or where they even hang out most of the time—they seem to appear and disappear at will. No one knows how often they need to feed and a definitive population count remains elusive.

As for the number of white sharks in the waters off Cape Cod (which is the first question most people ask), we can say with some degree of acuity that it is in the low hundreds, but we’ll know more after Skomal’s findings are made public.

The Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries identified 68 individual whites in 2014, 142 in 2015 (101 of which were separate, distinct sharks that hadn’t been seen in 2014), and then 147 in 2016, including 89 new sharks. In other words, in that three-year period, as many as 250 individual sharks swam through Cape waters.

Among the things we do know are that sharks are here on the Cape for several months—May to October, or the tourist months, basically—every year, that their numbers appear to be increasing, and in the past two years they have been increasingly biting hooked striped bass right off lines.
And they sometimes bite people.

You can’t stop sharks any more than you can stop the tides or the earth’s rotation. It’s nature. In a 2017 interview with BU Today.com, Skomel said, “In the near term, I don’t think anyone is going to be able to modify the behavior of seals or sharks. They’re doing what they do naturally.”

The only way to eliminate the risk of a shark bite is to remain on shore.
IF YOU CHOOSE TO ENTER THE WATER:

• Be aware sharks hunt for seals in shallow water.
• Stay close to shore where rescuers can reach you.
• Swim, paddle, kayak and surf in groups – don’t isolate yourself.
• Avoid areas where seals are present.
• Avoid areas where schools of fish are visible.
• Avoid murky or low-visibility water.
• Limit splashing.
• Adhere to all signage and flag warnings at beaches.
• Follow lifeguard instructions.

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