HalcyonDaze
Contributor
Those bulls definitely came in spicy at the beginning, although once surprise failed they seemed to keep a pretty fair distance even though the stringer was floating away from you. If you'd noticed that initial rush a couple seconds later then yeah, that might have been ugly. I'd definitely want a second diver watching my back ... and the boat to be a lot closer.
As for the sandbars ... I've got a pretty funny shot from a Jupiter dive of one of the shark handlers holding a small one away from the bait crate by the nose, one-handed. They definitely get the "zoomies" and are persistent, but it typically doesn't take much to fend them off. They're like dogs that wait for a chance to snag your sandwich off the table, but won't try to go through you for it.
This gets to the point of it. Commercial shark fishing has been going on along the US east coast and off Florida for decades - middle of last century or so demand for shark liver oil was pretty high, until that was replaced by synthetic products - but the real step change came around the 1970s/1980s. The 70s were when you had foreign-flagged longliners coming into US waters; the response was for the US to close its territorial waters to foreign fishing and encourage the growth of domestic fishing fleets. Unfortunately at this point a number of the high-value longline fisheries, like tuna and swordfish, were hammered pretty badly. In the early 1980s NMFS termed sharks an "underutilized resource" and it was basically no-limit fishing for them. This was also about when the shark-fin soup market got big. At this point we were still pretty clueless about shark ecology; as late as 1990 scientists were thinking even apex species like great whites had a lifespan of approximately 20 years (we now know that they're just hitting maturity at that age; even relatively low-tier species like blacktips take around 7 years to hit maturity).
1990 was the peak of shark landings in Florida, with about seven million pounds brought in. After that things started nosediving and the realization sunk in that wasn't sustainable. 1993 was when NMFS actually instituted a quota system; the industry objected to the science recommendation and as a compromise NMFS set the limit at 50% of what previous landings were. 1997 was when that was reeled down to what the biologists were calling sustainable, which is now about 8% of peak, as well as limitations or prohibitions on more vulnerable species like duskys, sandbars, hammerheads, and white sharks. The split of things is a bit complex; there are several different management groups (large coastal sharks, small coastal sharks, pelagics, etc.) and some are broken into separate quotas for different regions (Atlantic, Eastern Gulf, Western Gulf). How sustainable it is on the economic side is a good question; last time I looked the total gross revenue (sales to dealers) for shark meat and shark fins in Florida was reported at something around $750,000 - $800,000 per year, which explains why there's only maybe 2-3 boats in the state that account for the bulk of that (the individual who had his gear stolen in this case as I recall claimed about $250,000 a year in shark landings, so he's likely one of them). About half that value is shark fin sales and the meat makes up the rest; last I looked for 2021 Atlantic large coastal shark meat prices were averaging $1.21/lb, which despite being high by historical standards is not exactly a windfall. The last few years Atlantic large coastal shark landings haven't met quota, probably because boats decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
The current management strategy seems to be working to rebulid things; the catch is that we've also got a lot more people out fishing now (both spearfishing and angling) and most of them haven't been on the water long enough to remember that pre-1980s environment. Patrick Price for instance before he died last year was giving interviews left and right saying he'd been "fishing for 25 years" and had "never seen sharks this bad;" it distresses me as much as anyone else to do the math and realize that put him starting out in 1996 when we had thoroughly beaten east coast shark populations to a pulp. We basically now have a generation or two of resource users who got used to shooting or hooking a fish and landing it without much competition; to them the current state of affairs looks like an "explosion" of sharks. So - just like with goliath grouper in Florida, seals in New England, and wolves out west - there's a backlash and a push to "restore" a "balance" that was in reality severely out of whack. Saner move would probably be to adjust fishing gear and techniques.
