Two Ocean County beach towns have shut down drone-assisted shark fishing on their beaches, and they did it without writing a single new rule.
Bay Head police posted a notice on Aug. 17 saying the practice is not permitted in the borough. Mantoloking followed the next day. Both cited an existing New Jersey statute, NJSA 2C:40-28(d).
"New Jersey law prohibits knowingly operating or using an unmanned aircraft system to take or assist in the taking of wildlife," the Bay Head Police Department said in its notice. Both departments said they will enforce it strictly.
Bill Gagne, president of the Bay Head Improvement Association, which maintains and operates the borough's public beaches, framed it as a rediscovery rather than a crackdown.
"There is a state law prohibiting unmanned vessels from dropping bait in the water to catch wildlife," Gagne said. "It's not something that's a new statute, a new law; it's simply a law that they weren't quite aware of at the time and now they're going to enforce it."
The dispute has been building since mid-July, when a bull shark was caught on a Bay Head beach in daylight by a group of lifeguards, photographed, and released. A 12-foot tiger shark followed on Aug. 8 at Island Beach State Park, caught around midday on a stretch closed to swimming.
Mayor Bill Curtis has been the loudest voice. In an interview with ABC News he said operators using drones and kayaks to place bait offshore were effectively chumming, and worried a shark could mistake "a child swimming frantically in the water" for chum.
"The chumming is just unconscionable to me," Curtis told ABC News. "It's luring predators close to shore, and they can't stop them."
Anglers say that description does not match what is happening. A.J. Rodondella of Middletown, who owns the guide service Apex Predators, told the Asbury Park Press that nobody is chumming at the scale Curtis describes, and that small amounts of bait are dropped several hundred yards off the beach at night, when no swimmers are in the water.
Chumming has a specific meaning in fishing: a continuous stream of chopped bait laid down to create a scent trail. Dropping one or two baited hooks is not the same technique, a distinction the Patch reporting on the dispute drew out at length.
Gagne is unpersuaded by the timing argument.
"If a shark determines that there is a food source in this area, they're not going to go away just at 9:30 in the morning because we happen to start having people going and swimming in the ocean," he said.
Scott Thomas of Grumpy's Tackle in Seaside Park, whose customer base leans heavily on surf fishermen, offered the practical context. He said shore-based shark fishing has grown sharply over the past three years on the back of a larger shark population, with anglers catching three to seven sharks a night this summer. Drones are being used to carry baited hooks 200 to 300 metres out, roughly two to three football fields. Brown, sandbar and sand tiger sharks are the usual catch, with the occasional spinner, tiger or bull.
Shore-based shark fishing itself remains legal in New Jersey, as it does in most coastal states, and the sharks in question are released. There have been no shark attacks at the Jersey Shore in 2026. The University of Florida's International Shark Attack File records 15 in New Jersey dating back to the 1800s.
Gagne said he hopes a compromise can be found that keeps swimmers safe and still allows fishing. For now, the drones stay grounded.