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Mickey Z
Cool Observer
the Department of Homeland Security.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Great White Sharks, book recommendation, and a few days away from the computer ahead
Tomorrow (after I make one more post here, of course), Michele and I will sneak away for few days out of the city. It’s a little respite before heading back to Texas for my mom’s third chemo treatment next week. Our destination: The very tip of Long Island.
Lots of sharks out there and, by coincidence, I just finished reading a very excellent shark book: “The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.”
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-080507581x-0
(view from down under a Great White)
This all reminded me of a Veg News column I once wrote about about Montauk’s annual two-day shark “tournament.”
This event provided “excitement and entertainment for all,” said reporter Joan Zandell in the Montauk Pioneer. The tournament rules were simple: Roughly 350 boats head out from Star Island Yacht Club and Marina, hunting sharks. Only one shark per boat, Zandell explained, but that restriction only applied to the weigh-in. The fishermen could catch as many sharks as they pleased and merely choose one to be entered each day to be “hung from the scale” before “hundreds” of spectators.
Zandell wrote of one shark that was hooked “through the eye sockets” as “men, women and children looked on.” She spoke of a “morbid fascination rampant in the crowd” as one particularly large fish was “hoisted up like a flag, its tongue hanging out, its sexual parts strangely rigid and protruding…before everyone’s mesmerized gaze.” After being weighed, the murdered shark was gutted, “the foul stench of blood and innards” permeated the air.
And what became of Montauk’s bitter aquatic crop of 700 dead sharks? After they were weighed and gutted, explained Zandell, the sharks were “carted away and their meat used to feed the homeless.”
Question: Who’s the real “great white killer”?
Bonus Shark Cam:
http://www.mbayaq.org/efc/efc_smm/smm_cam.asp?bhcp=1
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