This weekend, the New Hampshire-based Team Off the Rocks reeled in two blue sharks that were within a decent lunch of the Maine state record weight. It wasn’t enough to claim the $10,000 bonus prize for a new record, but it was plenty to take the fifth annual Downeast Maine Shark Tournament, held Friday and Saturday with sharks weighed at Camp Ellis Pier in Saco.
The team, captained by Corey Sherrill out of Barrington, N.H., brought in a 446-pound blue shark on Friday and a 448-pound blue shark on Saturday. The Maine record for a blue shark is 451 pounds.
Off the Rocks finished with 894 points. Scoring was based on one point per pound for blue sharks – the most common shark found off the waters of southern Maine – and 1.5 points per pound for other sharks, such as mako, thresher or porbeagle sharks. Teams were allowed to land and weigh one shark on each day of the tournament.
As winners, Sherrill and his crew will receive about $3,000 in tournament prize money (half of the net profit), as well as two Penn International 50 VSW reels on Penn International stand-up rods, which retail at about $1,000 apiece. The other half of the proceeds is going to the United Way of York County.
Second place went to Tea Sea Monkeys out of Westbrook, captained by Richard Robichaud and Jean Bealu. The team registered 779 points with a 364-pound blue shark on the first day and a 415-pound blue shark on the second day.
In third was Saco-based Team N’Pursuit, captained by John Turgeon. The team caught a 405-pound mako shark on Saturday for 608 points.
Fourth place went to Team Reel Addiction, captained by Mike Keegan of Saco, which landed a 325-pound blue shark on day one and a 167-pound mako shark on day two for 596 points.
Team Malmax, captained by Peter Mourmouras of Biddeford, took fifth place with a 447-pound blue shark on day two.
Reel Addiction brought the first shark of the tournament to the scale early on Friday evening. The 345-pound blue shark was hoisted on a crane, weighed and then harvested for research by a team of marine biologists.
Keegan said he and his crew caught the shark about 40 miles out at the Platts.
“We fought it for about an hour and 45 (minutes),” Keegan said. “It’s just a lot of back and forth. You get some line back and the fish takes it and strips it off. It’s a back and forth until you get it to the boat and have a chance to tie it up and get it into the boat.”
Marine regulations state a shark must have a fork length of 4.5 feet to be landed. The tournament requires a fork length of nine feet for blue sharks.
Blue sharks aren’t edible, so after the biologists take samples, the remains are shipped off to be composted. Mako, thresher and porbeagles, however, are edible. If the crew does not want the meat after weigh-in, it is donated to area soup kitchens, according to tournament director and founder Dave Johnson.
James Sulikowski, a marine biology professor at the University of New England, was one of the biologists harvesting and taking samples from the sharks after weigh-in. He said the measurements and blood, tissue and organ samples help researchers assemble information on sharks and assist with the “management and conservation of the species.”
“What makes this tournament beneficial to us is it targets the larger individuals,” Sulikowski said. “Those are the ones we need for a lot of our growth curves and assessments. What are the maximum sizes? The maximum ages? All those things help us factor in to more precise management. It’s information we can’t get on out own.”
Despite the charity and research benefits of the shark tournament, a number of animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States and the Maine Animal Coalition, banded together to take out a full-page advertisement in last week’s Sun Chronicle calling for an end to the shark tournament. It included three photos of bloodied dead sharks with the headline, “The Downeast Shark Tournament Is Downright Shameful.”
The ad said shark tournaments “are cruel spectacles that further devastate shark populations and ecosystems.” It goes on to call them “grotesque displays where sharks are hooked, bled, suffocated or repeatedly gaffed.”
A total of 14 sharks where killed and weighed at this year’s tournament.
“We kill a few during the shark tournament, but the rest of the year if we’re out there shark fishing, it’s catch and release,” Johnson said. “This tournament is 95 percent catch and release.”
“It’s not us sport fishermen who are killing all these fish,” Keegan said. “We kill one fish a year – two fish a year at the most. We catch a lot and don’t kill many of them. We treat them with respect. If it’s not a harvesting fish, we’re going to let it go and see that it swims away.”
Johnson said the much bigger threat to shark populations around the world is the shark finning industry, which he said is like “modern-day piracy.”
Shark fins are used in food dishes, such as shark fin soup, and have purported medical benefits. The demand for fins, especially in Asia, is high. According to the Humane Society Web site, tens of millions of sharks are killed each year through shark finning.
“These guys go out using long lines and other ways of catching large amounts of sharks,” Johnson said of shark finners. “At sea, they get the sharks on the boat and slice off all their fins and throw the rest of the shark back in the water alive. Then it dies. They only want the fins.”
Johnson said he, like the Humane Society, is concerned about the depletion of shark populations.
“We fish for these guys,” he said. “We don’t want to see them disappear from the ocean.”
Johnson said he made the Humane Society an offer to cancel the tournament. He said he told them, “If you send a check for $50,000 to the United Way of York County, I’ll cancel the tournament tomorrow.”
That, he said, is the amount of money the tournament would raise for the charity over 10 years. So far, Johnson said, “There ain’t no check.”
For more on the Downeast Maine Shark Tournament, visit www.mainesharktournament.com
For more on the Humane Society’s position on shark tournaments, visit www.humanesociety.org/protectsharks
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