They live about 60 years but do not start reproducing until around age 20. Tracking Great White Sharks With Ocearch Six facts about great white sharks: A great white shark can eat 11 tons of food per year. As the shark glommed onto the chum, McBride reached over the gunwale and embedded the circle hook - with his bare hands. In those cases, Fischer teased the fish right alongside the Contender with chum on the end of a gaff. In their 2012 expedition to Cape Cod, the Ocearch shark tracker crew hooked just two sharks. He believes the Atlantic population is the wildest, most untouched in the world. Since 2007, Fischer’s crew has undertaken 17 missions to tag and release great whites around the globe. The tricky part is getting a great white shark to eat at all. “We’re catching 2,000- to 4,000-pound fish in under an hour.” “Getting good at catching and releasing big fish is what led to this,” he said. Prior to founding Ocearch, Fischer and his wife, Melissa, traveled the world chasing the largest fish that swim, and they hosted a television show about it called Offshore Adventures. When the angling team aboard the Contender hooked that 14-footer, the team relied on countless hours of experience with billfish and other large pelagics. Tracking Great White Sharks With Ocearch Tagging and tracking great whites takes a lot of equipment to do successfully. Great white sharks, like the one hooked by Ocearch only two days prior, like to eat them. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates the local seal population to be somewhere around 16,000. From a distance the large brown masses on the beach looked like large piles of riprap, or rocks, but then we noticed the rocks moving. The M/V Ocearch sat anchored, and chumming, less than a mile off the beach.Īs we left the inlet and hugged the shoreline of Monomoy en route to the mothership, the reason became readily apparent. We anticipated a long ride to a remote blue-water location, but when we boarded the RIB we were informed it would take less than 10 minutes. We stood on the docks at a marina in Chatham, Massachusetts, waiting for an aluminum RIB made by Safe Boats to pick us up and escort us out to the Ocearch mothership, a 126-foot vessel that was once used for king crab fishing in the Bering Sea. Tracking Great White Sharks With Ocearch Chris Fischer is Ocearch’s founder and expedition leader. Two days after the Ocearch crew hooked this shark within spitting distance of Cape Cod, they invited us on board to describe the work that goes into catching such a spectacular animal, and hopefully to provide us a front-row seat to catching another one. “We give scientists access to these animals so they can gather the data.” “People’s perceptions of sharks are driven by emotion, and there’s a lack of data,” explained Chris Fischer, the group’s founder and expedition leader. It’s a thrill ride, but that’s not the reason crew members do it. It has conducted expeditions all around the world, including Australia, South Africa and here, in Cape Cod. This is what Ocearch, a nonprofit organization dedicated to studying the world’s largest marine animals, does. Matt Boutetįor the crew aboard the Contender and the Ocearch shark tracker team, this was a very good day. Tracking Great White Sharks With Ocearch The Ocearch mothership is a 126-foot vessel that was once used for king crab fishing in the Bering Sea. Brett McBride, could jump into the water with it. Now all they had to do was steer the fish back to a research vessel so one of the team, Capt. Suddenly, that dark shape exploded out of the water, looking about the size of a Subaru Forester. The fish ate the tuna head and started peeling out coiled rope. At that moment one of the crew members pulled a decoy, meant to resemble a swimming seal, out of the water while another threw in a tuna head impaled with a giant Mustad Perfect Circle 27/0 hook and a stainless-steel chain leader. Using an elaborate bait-and-switch technique, the crew on the Contender teased the fish until it moved in just behind the transom. The pilot radioed the crew of nearby anglers and said, “I’ve got one very tight to the beach.” With that news the crew mobilized its fishing platform, a Contender 28 Tournament with twin 300 hp Yamahas, within range. 20 a plane flying low over Monomoy Island, off the Massachusetts coast, spotted a dark shape in the water, not far from where a group of seals were moving in and out of the surf. Tracking Great White Sharks With Ocearch The Ocearch team has conducted expeditions around the world in an effort to gather more data about great white sharks.
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