A CAPE COD TARPON IS CAUGHT WHILE SHARK FISHING
Angler Hans Brings shocked the Atlantic Coast fishing community in August when he landed a 5-foot tarpon on a Cape Cod beach, hundreds of miles from where anyone would expect it.
Generally, if you’re fishing the New England shore, you’re looking for such species as striped bass, bluefish, fluke or false albacore. Brings has pursued all of those since his father began teaching him how to fish from a beach at age 4.
But Brings and friends were after sharks the night of August 12 in Mashpee, Massachusetts. “The primary species is the brown or sandbar shark, as it’s known down South,” and fishing for them is growing in popularity, he says.
The brown sharks can be as big as 7 feet long, and both their teeth and skin can easily abrade standard lines, so stout tackle and tough leaders are required.
Brings used an 11-foot Tsunami Trophy II rod with a Fin-nor Offshore 7500 spinning reel spooled with 65-pound braid. The rig was 5.5 feet of 300-pound mono, a fish-finder swivel, a 5-ounce Sputnik-style sinker, 1 foot of 175-pound wire, and a 12/0 Eagle Claw circle hook tipped with a bluefish chunk.
The first fish Brings landed that night was a sand tiger shark, a less-common fish for the spot. “It was an awesome catch, and that was the reason I stayed longer than I usually do,” he says. “The bite was starting to heat up, shark-wise. But I guess there was something else out there too.”
In the early hours of Sunday, Brings experienced two strong runs from fish that eventually dropped the bait. At the time, he assumed they were sharks. But there was no guesswork needed for the fish that bit at 3 a.m.
“The first few runs were pretty intense,” he recalls. He estimates he had 40 pounds of drag on the reel, but the spool kept spinning. Brings was thinking he had a big brown shark or even a ray. “Halfway through, the fish would almost hold its place, and it was very hard for me to turn it. I had to sit in the sand and kind of wrench it back. When it did turn, it started shaking its head. Rays don’t do that.”
With friend Mike Xidea taking photos, Brings eventually pulled the fish into the wash, still thinking he was fighting a shark. The truth became clear when he finally got a good look. “I saw the jaw, I saw the massive scales, and I identified it immediately as a tarpon,” he says. “This really was an odd and mysterious catch.”
Tarpon certainly aren’t unheard of in the Northeast. Brings was aware of one documented catch years back and rumors of others. They have been caught as far north as Nova Scotia. New Jersey even has a tarpon category in its state records, currently held by Jim Klaczkiewicz, who caught a 53-pounder off Sea Bright in 1982.