HOOKED ON MAKO : Elusive Shark Offers All the Fight and Flavor a Fisherman Could Ask

The boat drifts, rolling and pitching on the ocean swells. The midday sun has baked all shade from the deck; no breeze stirs. No one speaks. The anglers sit on the cabin roof or lean against the rail, each scanning his own patch of glinting ocean--watching, waiting.

For hours they have played and replayed in their minds a picture of what the moment will be like. From myths and movies, each has pieced together a furious spectacle of the slashing teeth and flailing tail of a big mako shark on the hook.

It used to be that makos--and sharks generally--were considered something to avoid in the waters off Orange County. They were a dangerous nuisance, an annoyance to anglers robbed of their bait, a “trash fish” to be discarded if caught.

But about five years ago, a handful of local sport fisherman discovered the mako’s tasty flesh and awesome fighting abilities and began pursuing the shark.

Now it has become one of the most hunted big-game fish in the local seas--on a par with marlin and swordfish--luring commercial fishermen as well as thousands of amateurs, such as those on this boat, each of whom paid $40 for a chance to capture one of nature’s perfect killers.

The Gamefish, a 48-foot charter fishing boat, rumbled out of Dana Point Harbor at 7 a.m. with 15 on board--12 men, two women and a boy. They ranged in age from 15 to 68 and represented a wide range of occupations: antique dealer, law student, mechanic, carpet salesman. A few had hunted shark before. Most had not.

“It’s been kind of slow out here lately,” said skipper and veteran sharker Tom Shanahan, 29, of Vista, as he headed the boat toward open ocean.

“Most likely we’ll run into a bunch of blue sharks. Blues outnumber makos 5 to 1.”

But blues are “lousy to eat,” Shanahan said. “Their meat is full of ammonia; they’re called urine fish .”

And more important, he said, the blues do not use the defensive pyrotechnics of the main quarry of this hunt.

“Mako is what we’re after,” he said. “Hard to find, hard to catch. They jump and fight 10 times harder than any blue shark ever thought of fighting.”

Shanahan, who has been running fishing boats for 15 years, said he liked to shark-fish on his own long before the current interest and started his once-a-week mako expeditions to fill slack time in his charter fishing schedule.

The expeditions have become so popular that he has added a second weekly shark trip this summer. He will be taking anglers out Mondays and Wednesdays, from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., through September, when shark season ends. Shanahan supplies the bait and whatever aid is needed. Anglers, who take home whatever they catch, must bring their own rods and reels or rent them; tackle can be bought on the boat.

On this overcast August morning, dressed for action in T-shirt, jeans and yellow waders, Shanahan guided the Gamefish toward the hunting grounds.

The thing about sharks, though, is that you don’t really look for them. They find you.

Makos are free-roaming ocean sharks. They can be found at the surface or several hundred feet down. They feed on fast fish--mackerel, tuna, other sharks--or whatever morsel they happen upon in their travels.

So on this day, Shanahan looked for a place offering sharks as many enticing components as possible: clear water, an area of temperature change, birds on the water, schools of small fish detected by the boat’s depth meter.

At nine miles out from Dana Point, Shanahan, scanning his depth meter, whooped, “Oh, Yeah! Big bait ball right down here! OK gang, here we are. This is the spot.”

Shanahan had brought the Gamefish to the neighborhood of “267 seamount,” one of several points between Orange County and Santa Catalina Island where the sea floor rises--in this case to about 1,200 feet below the surface. Fish congregate here, as deep ocean currents well up like wind against a mountain range.

Where little fish are, Shanahan figured, bigger fish may be close by.

He killed the engines, allowing the boat to drift.

The deckhand, Jeff Foreman, 24, of San Clemente, grabbed an ax handle and stirred a barrel filled with a soup of mackerel heads, blood and seawater.

He stuffed a gunny sack with some of the fish heads and tied it to the back of the boat, letting the oozing bag hang in the water. He filled a perforated plastic bucket with some of the blood and hung it from the railing of the boat so blood trickled into the sea.

An oily ribbon on the water--called the “chum slick”--began stretching farther and farther away from the boat. Within a few hours it would become a miles-long curtain of blood, fish scent and meat particles that reached from the surface down about 100 feet.

From his perch on the bridge, Shanahan looked out on the slick, satisfied.

“When the chum gets stretched out and that stink gets in the water, hopefully the toothy critters will come and get it,” he said.

At 9 a.m., the anglers had hustled into position on the rails. The mood was electric with anticipation.

“Are we going to catch a great white?” asked Nemia Lebrilla, 25, of Long Beach.

“We see them sometimes, but we stay away from them,” Shanahan said about the world’s most dangerous species of shark.

Lebrilla had come shark fishing at the urging of her boyfriend, Jim Roberts, 25, of Detroit. Both are law students at Georgetown University in Washington.

“My brother went shark fishing, and I saw a shark in our refrigerator and said no way am I going to eat that,” Lebrilla said. “But Jim said, ‘We gotta go, we gotta go,’ so here we are.”

Some, including Lebrilla and Roberts, readied simple but sturdy rods and reels.

Juan Moreno, 49, of Costa Mesa, on the other hand, adjusted a two-speed, titanium-and-graphite reel that cost $400. “You shift it down to the lower gear, and you get a lot more pulling power.”

Deckhand Foreman passed out mackerel heads for everyone to use as bait on their forged-steel hooks.

But Tony Woodard, 37, of Dana Point set to work rigging a complicated lure, using a rainbow trout as shark bait. He works as a carpet salesman in Laguna Hills and tries to go out on the shark boat every week.

“I love it,” he said. “I have my own boat, but this way I don’t have to chum or drive the boat. I can just fish.”

He took great pains to make sure his trout would be a sure-fire shark pleaser. He broke the back of the dead fish so it would “flop back and forth and look like it’s swimming.”

He carefully planted two hooks in the body of the fish--one at the head, one at the tail--to double his chances of hooking a shark. “We call the one at the back the ha-ha hook,” Woodard said, “because when the shark bites the tail end and thinks he’s missed the hook, you can say, ‘Ha Ha’ and hook him.”

As a final touch, Woodard squirted Glow Bait liquid into the gills before he lowered the trout into the water. In seawater, the liquid turned phosphorescent green--a color that sharks apparently find delectable.

Tom Jardel, 45, of San Diego, sought heavenly intervention. He made a sign of blessing over his hook before casting his bait overboard.

“I’ve never tried shark before,” he said.

Stevan Lazich, 15, the youngest member of the party, sent his bait into the depths and settled back. “I just want to catch something big .”

Shanahan made the rounds of each angler, checking reels: “Keep your reels out of gear. When the shark hits, you want him to take your line not your rod.”

Shanahan then completed his own preparations.

On the quarterdeck behind the bridge, he put down the gaff, a six-foot aluminum pole tipped with a stainless steel hook that is honed razor sharp. When an angler hauls a shark close enough to the boat with the reel, Shanahan snags it with the gaff to hold it close to the boat’s keel.

But a gaffed mako is an angry mako. So Shanahan went to the bridge to load his .38-caliber, five-shot revolver. “I use a range load,” he said. “It’s quieter, and the blunt square slug gives greater impact at close range.”

He laid the holstered pistol on the quarterdeck next to the gaff.

Fog still shrouded the coastline, but around the boat shafts of sunlight began to pierce the gloom, illuminating great swatches of sea.

Everything was ready.

“Come on sharkie-poos. Come on,” Lebrilla cooed to the waves.

The waiting had begun.

By 2 p.m., the anglers had run out of fish stories. There are only so many big ones that got away. Chatter ebbed. It had been five hours since the bait was set out. Still no sign of sharks.

Some anglers fell victim to the relentless rise and fall of the swells. Lebrilla had the worst of it. “I’m bummed. I’ve spent five hours puking and haven’t caught a thing,” she moaned.

Others made less frequent but no less unpleasant trips to the rail.

There were occasional bursts of excitement. A pod of two dozen dolphins swam by. A finback whale, black, perhaps 50 feet long, surfaced near the boat a few times, then disappeared. A swordfish jumped 20 feet in front of the boat. Foreman grabbed the one live mackerel in the bait tank, hooked it and tossed it toward the swordfish. The mackerel flew off the hook and was lost.

Callie Ellis, 50, an antique dealer from Memphis who was visiting relatives in Dana Point, hooked a shark, but it turned out to be a baby.

By mid-afternoon, they had retreated into their own private reveries as they sweated in the heat and stared at the waves, searching for a telltale fin or flash, aware that soon it would be time to head back to port.

Suddenly, the day’s silence and despair were shattered by the screaming whine of Wendell Brice’s reel. Something very large was swimming away very fast with his bait.

Instantly galvanized, they rushed to surround him.

Brice, 68, a retired oil field engineer from Dana Point, held the rod with two hands, white-knuckled, and stared at the line whizzing from the reel. He eyes were wide, his mouth fixed in a half-smile, half-grimace.

“Wait. Wait. Wait,” Shanahan cautioned him. “Let him go. Let him take it.”

Brice had his finger on the reel lever, ready for the crucial moment when he would stop the line and haul back on the rod to set the forged steel hook in the shark’s mouth.

“Now!” Shanahan yelled.

Brice, eyes closed, yanked back hard on the rod. Once. Twice. Like a puppet, he was jerked forward against the rail by the force at the end of his line.

At the same instant, 30 yards away, a missile of gray and white exploded from the water. The shark twisted and writhed, conical snout skyward, jaws agape, fins outstretched, flanks glistening silver in the sunlight. It hung in the air at the top of its arc for a second before falling on its back in a huge splash.

“ Mako !” several people shouted simultaneously. Others shouted something indecipherable, guttural, at the sight of the leaping shark.

Brice worked the fish--or the fish him--up and down the length of the boat. He slowly, jerkily, reeled in the line, inch by inch, giving up one, taking two. His form may not have been pretty, but Brice didn’t care. “Kind of like landing airplanes: Whatever works is good,” he said with a pant.

“There’s color!” someone yelled as the mako loomed up bluish gray from the deep.

“Get him! Get him!” several urged in chorus. Brice had the rod, but after a day of frustrated hopes, the shark belonged to all of them.

Callie Ellis, Brice’s sister-in-law, was taken aback. “This is a bunch of crazy people.”

After 15 minutes of effort, Brice brought the mako in close to the bow of the boat. Shanahan was there with the gaff. He reached down and plunged the barbed point into the side of the fish.

The mako went berserk, thrashing, banging its head against the keel. It seemed to knock the hook loose from its mouth.

“Get the gun! get the gun!” Shanahan screamed to his deckhand as he struggled to contain the wounded shark’s fury.

Foreman jumped to the quarterdeck and grabbed the .38 from the holster. He ran back to the bow, leaned over the rail and fired five quick, deafening rounds into the head and neck of the shark.

Shanahan told everyone to get out of the way. With an immense heave, he threw the mortally wounded mako onto the rear deck. It was a female, five feet long, about 80 pounds.

“No, no, no! Step back!” Shanahan commanded as everyone crowded close to look. “She can still get somebody with those teeth.”

Those teeth. Long, slender, smooth-edged, like needles planted in a ragged array around the jaws.

With the quarry bloodied and dying in front of them, the hunters now seemed oddly subdued.

Foreman grabbed a long knife and neatly beheaded the mako. “I do it for safety. I’ve seen them almost stand up on the deck, whipping their heads back and forth, teeth flashing.”

Brice stood well back from the shark as Foreman gutted it and prepared to cut it into about 50 steaks.

Brice was still shaky from the adrenaline rush of landing the mako but also from something else.

“I got kind of nervous while I was trying to bring it in,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose it. But not just for me. I think everyone was depending on me to bring it in.”

When the mako had been filleted, Brice claimed the jaw, but he made sure everyone aboard took home a piece of the shark.