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.)

THAT IS, IF HE could find any. No makos turned up on the first day of the tournament. Now it's day two, three hours in: Potts, Rocko, the New Jersey trio, and I are drifting along at the head of a chum line when we hear on the tournament's official radio station that someone boated a mako of over 300 pounds, the fish to beat.

Potts has his black kite out again. He flies it out with a small clip halfway up the string, and he attaches a fishing line to the clip. One end of the line is spooled onto a rod and reel on the boat, and the other end hangs down from the kite string to the water's surface, where it is tied to two big hooks lashed to a live three-pound bluefish. The kite keeps the fish bobbing at the surface, but it's not strong enough to pull the fish out of the water. The technologies that bring us e-mail and intercontinental ballistic missiles are completely unimpressive to me, but the ingenuity of this kite idea blows my mind.

Just as I'm getting ready to doze off on the bridge, son number two starts yelling, "The kite, the kite, the kite!" I look over and something the size of a canoe is thrashing at the live bait, which is bucking against the kite and bopping in and out of the water. After what seems like a full minute, the shark gets hold of the bait, starts to pull the kite down into the water—and then loses the bait. The little bait fish comes popping back up and the shark nails it again, hooks and all. This time the shark pulls hard enough to pop the line free from the clip on the kite string, releasing the kite and connecting itself directly to the rod and reel via a length of 100-pound-test monofilament.

Potts says it's a very large blue shark. The clients decide to fight the fish for fun, and the battle lasts about 45 minutes as they take turns with the rod. All the while, the two who aren't holding the rod joshingly punch the one who is and say things like, "Come on, you pussy, get that fucking guppy in here!" When they get the shark to the boat, it shows its disdain for the whole procedure by biting and thrashing at the hull, biting at the wire leader, and biting at Potts, who is trying to cut the leader while yelling at the clients to get out of the way.

The blue shark has another stainless-steel hook in its jaw besides the two we're going to leave it with. This is the least of its worries, though, as it is also tangled in a piece of discarded fishing net, which has cut an inch-deep gash all the way around the fish's head and across its gill openings. As it bucks and thrashes, I ask Rocko if he's going to cut the net off. He looks at the fish's open, tooth-riddled mouth and says, "If you want to get down there and take that net off, be my guest." I decline. Potts cuts the wire and the fish wags itself straight down. The blue and white sheen of its skin fades to ocean green and then disappears like really good magic.

And so we wait again. Rocko chops and ladles. Potts passes the time by telling his version of a story that is well known around Montauk, about a controversial occurrence that happened at a 1987 shark tournament weigh-in. He and his clients came in with a tiger shark that was a definite contender for the biggest catch, and against the usual protocol Potts hung it head-up on the scale. Another angler with a near-winner complained about this position. When they weighed the fish hanging by the tail, Potts says, "Two small sharks, a tuna, and a pound of packaged ground beef fell out of the fish's mouth."

Which raises an obvious question.

"No, I wouldn't do that," Potts says, grinning. "Why risk getting caught stuffing a shark for one single pound?"

"But the two sharks and the tuna weighed way more than a pound," I point out. "Why'd you hang it by the head?"

"We already had a hook in its head, so it just went up like that."

"Come on, man, packaged ground beef?"

He just shrugs and says that tiger sharks are scavengers, and then points to all the stuff we threw into our chum line, suggesting, I suppose, that the shark could have gotten the plastic-wrapped hamburger anywhere. Either way, Potts and his clients took first place. Case closed.

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