Shore Fisherman Catches Juvenile Tiger Shark on Cape Cod – On The Water
Every land-based shark fisherman has their own “magic” bait. For some, it’s the bloody head of a cocktail-sized bluefish or bonito caught earlier in the day—as fresh as it gets. Others prefer an oily, fresh (or recently-frozen) chunk of menhaden, and some are more inclined to favor the serpentine wriggle of a live or dead eel undulating in the waves. For Brendan Ryder of Massachusetts, the latter is typically his go-to bait, but he never imagined one of his eels would be scooped up by a juvenile tiger shark on Cape Cod.
Come June each year, when water temperatures begin to surpass the 65-degree mark, die-hard, land-based shark anglers across the Northeast coast flock to their most productive beaches to survey the shark scene. Brown sharks, also known as sandbar sharks, are the most common, along with the occasional sand tiger shark—which are not to be confused with tiger sharks. However, every now and then, shark anglers encounter strange or unexpected bycatch in the surf, which is part of the allure of fishing big baits from the beach late at night. Last summer, a shark fisherman on the south side of Cape Cod caught and released a 5-foot long tarpon. In early June of this year, a shark fishing guide in New Jersey caught and released a large thresher shark from the sand—a species which, generally, tends to avoid shallow water.
According to NOAA, tiger sharks are a highly migratory species with a distribution that ranges from Cape Cod to Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, and they prefer water temperatures above 72 degrees. Even so, tiger sharks are rarely ever seen, let alone caught in such shallow water in the Northeast.
Ryder was fishing for brown sharks on the south side of Cape Cod with his friends Tevin Meas, Miles Silun and Cole Pittman. “We were hoping for a sand tiger, if we were lucky,” said Ryder in an interview. Their group arrived to the beach around 5 p.m. and spent nearly six hours casting eels and dropping baits with their drone. But with a new moon approaching on August 4, the current picked up drastically throughout their outing, which left casting eels with heavy sinkers as their only remaining option.
Ryder, who lives two and a half hours from Cape Cod, tries to make the most of every outing and had planned to stay until the wee hours of the night; by 11:30, after six hours on the beach and four hours of playing catch and release with dogfish, morale was low. Then his drag started singing, and the crew sprung into action.
“It was a crazy fight,” said Ryder. “The fish swam parallel to shore so I had to run down the beach with it, and all the while it was taking short, sporadic runs. It just dug in and kept running to our right,” he continued. “I knew immediately it wasn’t a brown shark.”
After approximately 15 minutes of give and take, a juvenile tiger shark showed itself in the wash and Ryder’s buddies helped him land it. “It wasn’t the longest fight, but my drag was locked down tight and it still managed some crazy aggressive runs,” he recalled. The team of anglers managed to snap a couple of photos, remove the hook, and return it safely to the water in short order.
After almost 7 hours on the beach, most people would consider the release of a tiger shark the end of a successful night, but the group felt reinvigorated and continued fishing until 2:30 a.m.
“The first 4 trips of the year were slow,” said Ryder, who was accompanied and supported only by his girlfriend, Gigi Purcell, on those ventures. “But this one catch made all those long outings worth it.” One thing is for sure, anglers like Ryder and his friends, who put in long, often grueling hours on the beach late at night, are the ones who tend to luck into the most unbelievable catches. Although luck has very little to do with it.
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