Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [33]
Unknown at the time, thirty-five miles from shore—far out of sight of the rooftop spyglasses—rose an underwater mountain range of huge sand dunes ten miles long and a mile wide: a submerged island from the last ice age. In the 1920s, charter captains would discover this remarkable “Barnegat ridge” swarming with countless squid and other small fish being fed on by bonito, tuna, and false albacore. Rich men on Zane Grey holidays, sailing motor yachts resplendent in mahogany and brass, would be astonished by the tropical species close to the Jersey shore, giant marlin and wahoo. The first blue marlin from the tropics caught on the New Jersey coast was landed at Beach Haven. A visitor to Beach Haven landed a twelve-foot, 1,150-pound mako shark—the largest fish caught, at the time, anywhere in the world.
As men experimented with the new sport of game fishing, they became aware, and wary of, an unpredictable Beach Haven current that doomed the fishermen. During otherwise fine fishing weather, coastal currents would suddenly shift in their flow from a southerly direction to a northerly one. Strange as it seemed, this immediately chilled the coastal waters, and fish refused to bite or left the coast until the current switched and flowed southward, warming the waters again. Such currents were frustrating the fishermen that day. Cool water had moved in along the coast, driving off the menhaden, a southerly species of bait fish that migrated to New Jersey in the summer, drawing game fish. Although it had yet to be discovered, the cool coastal waters were a magnet to Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark.
That evening, as dusk approached, the young shark swam west toward shore. Thrown off by a whirl of the Gulf Stream, deep water where it failed to thrive, it had passed right over the abundant prey of the continental shelf and was becoming a hungry creature, moving slowly toward its natural habitat, the coastline, where the water was rich with enticements. As it approached, there were strong offshore upwellings of cold water common to Long Beach Island in the summertime, chilled water that would attract the big fish yet chase away other species—some of whom no doubt fled, as they always did, upon the arrival of the apex predator. The large prey fishes it had fed on in the shallows or the subtropics were gone.
Seven miles from shore, the shark began to pick up a stream of information. It smelled the rich cocktail of organisms washed to the coastline from rivers and inlets swollen with heavy summer rain. This triggered a genetic message: prey. But it smelled something else, something that didn't fit the automatic profile to hunt, but required what the great white would experience as a mild curiosity . . . a strong, disconcerting lure. Human waste, the product of urban development, was being pumped off the New Jersey coast then for the first time.
Two to three miles from shore, its progress was halted by a vast net suspended perpendicular to the coast, stretching six miles straight out to sea and covering every inch of potential passage from the surface to the bottom of the ocean. This was the first of some twenty-five fish “pounds” strung like a series of labyrinths along the coast of Long Beach Island. The pound fishermen hung the net from a series of ninety-foot poles of North Carolina hickory buried in the ocean bottom and rising above the waves like the masts of a shipwreck. The pound was framed on the three sides and bottom with great nets, forming an immense boxed trap. The island's thriving pound industry, second only to tourism, landed ten million pounds of fish a year. Even if the traps were empty, given the scarcity of fish, the surrounding coastal