Falling in Love with a Killer (cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2001

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Falling in Love with a Killer (cont.)

SITTING OUT ON THE eastern tip of Long Island, Montauk has the vibe of an isolated American outpost—a hard-core fishing town holding off the encroachment of the land-hungry, moneyed culture of the Hamptons, just to the west across an isthmus. While the Hamptonians sleep off gin fizzes and lobster bisque, the streets of Montauk are wide-awake before daylight. Beat-up pickups hauling bait, fuel cans, and dismantled outboard motors putter along like rolling hangovers. The most common bumper sticker in the area depicts a lighthouse next to a shark's head that is gobbling up the words fish montauk.

At one time, the waters off Montauk offered abundant big-game fishing. Not anymore. The past decades of poorly regulated commercial harvesting have nearly wiped out the swordfish, marlin, and tuna populations that gave the town its "Sportfishing Capital of the World" moniker. Now, if you want big-game fishing action here, sharks are the only reliable choice.

Montauk's modern shark-hunting era began on June 6, 1964, when local fisherman Frank Mundus harpooned a 4,500-pound great white that was feeding on a drifting whale carcass just off the coast. Mundus began marketing himself as the "Montauk Monster Man," promoted "Monster Fishing" to charter clients, wore a nasty-looking shark tooth around his neck, and made a spectacle of hauling out huge sharks and then hacking them to pieces on the harbor docks. Novelist Peter Benchley molded Mundus's methods into the Quint character in his 1974 novel Jaws. The Spielberg movie followed in 1975, and it not only scared beachgoers out of the water, but prompted marinas up and down the Atlantic seaboard to start hosting shark-hunting tournaments. Many of those tournaments have since disappeared, but Montauk's contests are still well attended, and this week hundreds of tourists and participants are converging at the Star Island Yacht Club, a large, full-service marina in Montauk Harbor.

Star Island hosts two of the town's four major annual shark-hunting tournaments: the Star Island Shark Tournament, in June, which offers awards for heaviest shark, heaviest mako, heaviest blue shark, and heaviest "other" shark; and Mako Mania, in August. Mako Mania is the connoisseur's event—the mako-only policy decreases the chances that an unskilled fisherman is going to have a shark to enter at the end of the day. Some conservationists applaud the tournament's restrictive policy; Star Island also invites marine biologists to the awards ceremony to examine any captured sharks. And makos, unlike other sharks, taste like swordfish, and get eaten.

Captain Michael Potts keeps his boat on the other side of the harbor from Star Island Yacht Club, at the far less swanky charter docks. His slip has a wooden archway decorated with several sets of shark jaws. The Blue Fin IV, as I see when Potts pulls in a few mornings before the tournament with a load of charter clients, is immaculate and without decorative frill, like something the U.S. Navy would design if it were into fighting fish.

The cabin looks like a fishing-supply warehouse. "Fishing has gotten so complicated," Potts says, pointing out all the equipment. "Those are gaff heads, that's ultralight tackle, light tackle, medium tackle, and heavy, offshore equipment. About 40 rods, conservatively. That's the freezer, where we keep bait, which reminds me that I've got to stop off and place an order. Those are kites, lure boxes, wire leaders, flying gaffs, cockpit stick. That's the head in there. That's my shotgun—Mossberg 12-gauge, pump action, stainless barrel. We use it on big sharks that are otherwise hard to get in the boat. Life ring, survival suits.

"But it hasn't always been like this," he continues. "I used to bring girlfriends down here to fool around. There were even cushions to lie on. Fishing's gotten so complicated now."

Potts has been fishing Montauk since he was eight. He would ride shotgun in a two-seater airplane with his mother, Margaret, searching the Atlantic for basking swordfish. When they found one, they'd drop a note in a bottle with the fish's coordinates to his father, George, in his boat below, and he would attempt to head the fish off and harpoon it. The summer after graduating from East Hampton High School in 1973, Michael began captaining the Blue Fin IV. After a brief exile to the Florida Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor's degree in environmental biology, Potts returned to Montauk in 1981; he took over the family business three years later and now does charter fishing almost exclusively.

Potts never participates in a shark tournament for his own enjoyment; if he joins one, it's because he's been hired by a paying client. Potts gets $1,000 for a day of chartered big-game fishing, and the New Jersey businessman who hired Potts for this year's event paid the boat's $600 tournament registration fee. Star Island pays out $4,000 for the biggest mako, on down to $1,000 for the fourth-largest, but the real money in Mako Mania comes from side-betting pools called calcuttas, which cost from $200 to $2,000 to buy into. The payout is up to several hundred thousand dollars. Potts and the New Jersey businessman entered three calcuttas and agreed to split whatever they might win.

Of the 30 Montauk shark tournaments Potts has fished, he's helped his clients to catch prizewinning sharks in six of them, the biggest a 724-pound tiger shark. The client's only responsibilities are to show up at 5 a.m. and then take a seat. It's a shark safari, with Potts guiding his client to a fish, setting up the bait, and then handing off the rod.

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