MONTAUK, N.Y. — July 22, 2013 — This seaside community is increasingly getting attention as a trendy summer playground for the wealthy, but for decades it has been known for something else entirely: killing sharks.
The shark-fishing craze started here in the 1970s with a colorful push from a local angler, Frank Mundus, who popularized what he called “Monster Fishing” and who was a model for the grizzled shark hunter, Quint, in “Jaws.”
Today the piers are decorated with tails and dorsal fins of the sharks that swim these parts: threshers, makos, blues and the occasional great whites. The collection is replenished by the annual tournaments that offer pots of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the biggest sharks. The winning beast is hung by its tail, like a toothy testimony to man’s fear conquered.
Every now and then environmentalists would show up, carrying signs warning about the global decline of shark populations from overfishing and calling for an end to the slaughter. They were mostly ignored in a place where bumper stickers declare that the National Marine Fisheries Service, which regulates fishing hauls, has been “Destroying Fishermen and Their Communities Since 1976.”
But times change. And this summer, an artist, April Gornik, and an environmental group, Concerned Citizens of Montauk, led a successful effort to persuade some of the most prominent shark fishermen to try something new, and they hope, lasting: a contest where not a single shark is killed.
Read the full story at the New York Times