The white sharks off Cape Cod are no longer a curiosity for the charter fleet. They are a daily operating condition - and the fleet is split on what to do about them.
Capt. Ross Walkinshaw of Cape Cod Charter Guys is in the leave-early camp. He describes the animals in terms that owe more to a workshop than a wildlife documentary.
"It's like a chainsaw, it's not like a nice set of dentures," Walkinshaw told Outdoor Life. "That thing comes out, and it wants to bite things."
He has good reason for the imagery. One day last season he had a shark surface beside a client, relocated five miles, and then watched a second one take a hooked striped bass apart behind the boat.
"[The shark] came up and out in 9.7 feet of water and down on the striper and surgically cut it," he says. "It then folded my rod all the way down and almost pulled me over the set of motors."
Another four miles, and an 18-foot white breached. The trip ended there. "My customers had had enough," he says.
When numbers peak in late summer, Walkinshaw simply relocates his operation. "Last year, we had more than a dozen at our boat, so that's when we switch over to the south side, to the Vineyard, to get away from them," he says. "They aren't thick and heavy over there yet."
Capt. Doug Brown, 25 years in the business at Jenniferann Sportfishing Charters, sees the same sharks as a selling point.
"They're really a cool creature," Brown says. "They're just living in their environment. And we're in theirs."
He rates the risk to people in boats as negligible. "They don't really bother us," Brown says. "Occasionally they spook our fish away and, every once in a while they grab a customer's fish, but that's pretty cool to see. People don't mind that."
Brown suspects the boats themselves are the draw. "If they hear a diesel engine running, they know there's food around it and they key in on it," he says.
Capt. Tom Szado of The Perfect Catch Fishing, guiding since 1978, backs the commercial read. "We've had a few fish come back half eaten. But they haven't slowed down our business at all," Szado says. "They're not scared as long as the boat's floating and they can go out on the water."
South of the Cape, the problem barely registers. Capt. Andy LoCascio of Long Island Fishing Charters says white sharks are not part of his season at all. "We have many species of sharks that are more obvious," he says, "and none of them impact charter fishing."
The numbers behind the arguments are substantial. The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy tagged 268 white sharks off the Cape between 2010 and 2021 and detected 134 individuals in 2022 alone, and now calls the Cape the only known aggregation site in the northwest Atlantic. The rebound traces back to the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which restored the seal population, and to shark protections introduced in the 1990s.
What the captains are noticing next is smaller fish in Cape Cod Bay - whites under about nine feet - and researchers have followed the reports in.
"As far as the Cape goes, it's really the next frontier for white shark research," Megan Winton, senior scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, told CAI.
Greg Skomal of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries says the juveniles seem to be keeping deliberately clear of the adults, which will eat them given the chance. "What's really neat is they appear to be segregating from the larger white sharks," Skomal says.
Whether the Bay qualifies as essential habitat is now an open question, and this season's tagging is designed to answer it.
"We want to get a better understanding of this age/size group," Skomal says. "And so we're going to spend a little bit more time in the Bay - get some tags out to look at, not only their residency in the Bay, their behavior in the Bay, and where they go after they leave the Bay."
"And I said to the parents, 'There are white sharks out here.' And [the dad] said, 'Yeah, I know, we won't be out here long.' And I said, 'It doesn't take long.' What do you say to something like that? I just turned my boat and shut up."
Sources: Outdoor Life (Christine Peterson), CAI/WCAI (Amy Kolb Noyes), Atlantic White Shark Conservancy.