Charter skippers along the Connecticut shore are reporting striped bass coming to the boat in pieces, and they are no longer treating it as a bad week.
"It's epidemic. It's beyond what we could ever imagine," said Greg Dubrule, who has owned Niantic-based Blackhawk Sport Fishing for 57 years.
The fish doing it are mostly brown sharks, better known as sandbar sharks, a federally protected species that anglers may not retain. They have come back off Connecticut on the back of that protection, cleaner water and warming inshore temperatures, and the operators who work the same grounds every week say the change has been steep.
"They are everywhere - from Westbrook to Watch Hill," said Mike Roy, who runs Old Saybrook-based Reel Cast Charters. "Thousands of them, not hundreds."
Roy, 42, put a number on one morning off New London this week: "We have seen over 15 sharks today in two hours." His two boats, 23 and 27 feet, each carry three anglers on five-hour striped bass trips. That day each boat landed four bass. The typical haul, he said, used to be 20 to 30 fish per boat.
Roy launched his business in 2011 and says he never had a striper bitten in half until four years ago. Sharks now circle his boats routinely, he says, because they have learned the vessels mean food. He wants federal protection lifted for brown sharks and a "reasonable, sustainable season" opened to bring the fishery back into balance. "It's out of control," he said.
Sam Feteke, 25, who runs Twenty4Seven Guide Service out of Old Saybrook, has started avoiding water altogether. "Some places I won't even fish because the sharks are so bad," he said. "Around Fishers Island (at the eastern end of Long Island Sound) it's terrible." He backs lifting protection too, in blunter terms: "Whatever it takes to reduce the population."
The state's marine biologists are not disputing the recovery, but they are disputing the scale. David Molnar of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said protected coastal species - brown, sand tiger and dusky sharks - are more abundant largely because the fin-market harvest stopped. Brown sharks were hit hardest because of their outsized dorsal fins. They also mature slowly and produce one to three pups a year, so the rebuild has been gradual rather than explosive.
Protected sharks are more common along the shore now, Molnar said, "but they're not everywhere." He also pointed out that plenty of charter customers are delighted to hook one, intentionally or not.
"The water is a shark's home; we're just visitors," he said.
Molnar said state and federal fisheries managers meet in October, and a possible harvest season for one or more protected species is on the agenda - while noting that previous rollbacks of protection produced devastating overfishing. Connecticut has opened a shark sighting page to track the population; roughly 1,100 sightings were logged last year, including threshers and makos.
The research picture argues for caution on all of it. A study published this year in the ICES Journal of Marine Science reconstructed 100 years of shark depredation in Atlantic recreational fisheries from Maine to Texas, and found at least 51 target fish stocks affected by 22 shark species.
"At its essence, shark depredation is the result of an overlap between humans and wildlife," said lead author Dr Marcus Drymon of Mississippi State University and Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant. "In this case, the overlap is between recreational anglers and sharks competing for a shared resource. Navigating recent increases in shark depredation, real or perceived, requires a broader understanding of how this overlap has evolved over time."
That phrase - real or perceived - is the crux. NOAA lists several drivers running at once: rebuilding shark stocks, more anglers on the water, more released fish arriving at the surface injured or dead, and learned behaviour, with some evidence sharks associate engine noise with an easy meal. The agency also cautions that "sharks are not the only animals capable of depredation. Dolphins, seals, groupers and other large fish are all known to feed on anglers' catch. While sharks are easy to blame, they are not always the culprit." Connecticut captains agree on that much - they say seals cost them too - but rate sharks as the bigger problem.
The two species most often implicated nationally are bull sharks, which may be harvested, and sandbar sharks, which may not. Both have been prioritised for new stock assessments, which is where any argument about a Connecticut season will eventually be settled.
Dubrule, 76, runs a 75-foot party boat that also does sunset cruises and seal watches. He used to listen to Florida anglers complain they could not get a whole fish aboard.
"We're getting that here now," he said.