Moby Shark Looks Startling, Proves Harmless : Fishing: A 30-foot plankton-eater suffocates in a gill net off the Newport Pier. It’s the second unusual creature to die recently in such a net.

When Larry Capune went for his afternoon paddle aboard a 12-foot surfboard, he wasn’t ready for what he saw being towed by a fishing boat.

“I sort of looked behind this boat as it floated by me, and a huge fin popped up from the water,” said Capune, who nearly fell off his board when a giant, 30-foot basking shark passed by, suffocated from being trapped in a gill net.

Fish experts said Monday’s capture of a basking shark, especially by a gill net, is highly unusual for Southern California coastal waters.

Marine biologist Jeffrey Landesman said the giant fish, which weighed about 4,500 pounds and was harmless to people, was caught about a quarter-mile off the Newport Pier by fishermen who were gill-netting for halibut. Narrow-weave gill nets catch fish by entangling their gills in the mesh.

The shark’s dying in a gill net “really bothered me,” Capune said. “Here they’re catching everything in those gill nets and ruining it. It’s very depressing.”

Landesman, who works at Cabrillo Marine Museum in San Pedro, said: “The shark was probably close to shore, which is atypical but not totally uncommon for basking sharks.”

Basking sharks are the second-largest fish in the ocean, next to the whale shark, and sometimes grow 45 feet long and weigh 8,000 pounds. They are usually found in schools, swimming dozens of miles offshore, Landesman said.

“I’ve never seen one in the water myself,” he said. “Usually only professional underwater photographers and fishing boats spot these sharks, which swim near the surface of the water.”

Although they are members of the fish family that includes man-eating great whites, the basking shark is a gentle creature that feeds only on plankton or microscopic organisms.

The giant shark has a mouth big enough for an average-size man to stand up in, Landesman said. The mouth is used to gather in food and also helps the fish get oxygen through its gill system, he said.

“They can strain about 2,000 tons of water an hour through their giant mouths,” Landesman said. “But they need to swim about two to three miles per hour to get enough oxygen and feed. This one died because he got caught in the gill net and could no longer travel forward.”

Capune, a world-class paddler, said he followed the San Pedro-based fishing boat, Cam Ranh, as it was helped into Newport Harbor, thanks to a tow line from another vessel, the Maria Fatima. However, the Cam Ranh’s skipper could not find a truck big enough to haul out the fish. The Harbor Patrol eventually escorted the Cam Ranh with its catch out to sea about 6 p.m. Monday.

It was not immediately clear what became of the giant shark. Landesman, who was part of a Cabrillo team that examined the shark at Newport Harbor, said that although the shark’s flesh is edible, fisheries do not use or want them.

“There’s no market for basking sharks, but I’m sure in some parts of the world they may be eaten,” he said.

The Cabrillo team was given permission to sever the fish’s tail for study and eventual display, a task that took five volunteers several hours, Landesman said. The tail section alone was seven feet wide and weighed 150 pounds.

“The shark’s skin was extremely tough,” Landesman said. “We tried to puncture the tail to run a rope through it and secure it, but it was so hard we couldn’t do it.”

He said the skin was very abrasive, with “small spikes” that acted like small grappling hooks and cut into the biologists’ arms as they worked.

“With most sharks, you can run your hand in one direction and the skin is smooth, but abrasive if you run it in the opposite direction,” he said.

“With this basking shark, it was extremely abrasive in both directions. Just carrying the 150-pound tail into the truck left our arms bloodied.”

The shark was male and 9 to 18 years old, he said. Age is estimated by counting the number of rings of meat around the fish’s vertebrae.

It was the second unusual capture in recent months by gill-netters, he said. In November, an 18-inch, extremely rare angler fish was caught 20 miles south of San Clemente Island.

Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress) is the principal sponsor of a statewide initiative that would extend a ban on gill-net fishing along the coast from Point Conception to the Mexican border. Dolphins and fish in addition to the species that gill-netters are targeting routinely die in the nets.

The thought of losing a magnificent creature such as a basking shark to a gill net was disturbing to both biologists and Capune, the startled surfer.

“After all,” Capune said about the basking shark, “what’s left of him? Some piece of his tail in a museum so kids can touch it?”