From 'Jaws' to a plea to save sharks

Author's widow urges stop to annual fishing tournament

The Monster Shark Tournament has run for 22 years and draws hundreds of participants. (BILL GREENE/GLOBE STAFF/FILE)

Wendy Benchley is an unlikely poster child to end shark hunting.

Her late husband, Peter Benchley, made a fortune as author of the 1974 bestseller "Jaws."

Yes, the book may be one of the scariest shark tales of modern times. Yes, it spawned a movie that forced generations of swimmers to think twice before getting into the water. (Queue the soundtrack here.) But Wendy Benchley said times have changed, and those once-reviled sharks are now victims of another bloodthirsty predator: humans.

"Shark fishing tournaments continue this image of the shark as some monster, and this is 35 years" after "Jaws" she said in a phone interview yesterday from her home in Princeton, N.J. "To have a tournament is a throwback to when the ocean was brimming with life. It's a bit like people who used to go to Africa and hunt lions. We don't do that anymore."

Some accuse Benchley of biting the hand that feeds her.

"The whole thing strikes me as one of the most comical tactics I've ever heard of," said Steven James, president of the Boston Big Game Fishing Club, which sponsors the tournament. He called the concerns laughable and said that recruiting Benchley is a Humane Society publicity stunt. "She's inherited the fortune of the person most responsible for tainting the public perception of what sharks are about. You couldn't find anybody more ill prepared to discuss this topic."

At the request of the Humane Society of the United States, Benchley appeared before the Oak Bluffs Board of Selectmen last week to speak out against the July 17-19 Monster Shark Tournament. She asked the board to cancel the event, which could happen if the board does not grant the sponsors a liquor license or a permit to picnic at a public park.

The Humane Society has also waged a campaign to get people to e-mail the board and the town's Chamber of Commerce to shut down the tournament, calling it a gory event that glorifies killing.

James said that last year the Humane Society flew a plane with a banner above boaters, denouncing the 22-year-old event as cruel. Last year's tournament drew a record number of participants: 262 boats, each with a four-person crew. The cost to enter is as much as $1,475 per boat.

The event is an annual spectacle. The sharks, usually massive 200-400 pounders, are often hung along the docks at the end of the day, waiting to be weighed and gutted. Last year, anglers killed 26 sharks, often posing on the docks near their catch. The winner with the biggest catch gets a $60,000 fishing boat, James said.

The sport involves hours of Hemingway-esque laboring to land the shark without having the boat destroyed by the struggle or the fish simply getting away, James said.

"They fight like the dickens," he said.

The struggle can be epic, as anyone who has seen "Jaws" can attest. But Benchley said that after the book and movie came out, she and her husband saw shark hysteria grow and increasingly began to view the tournaments as "killing for killing's sake." Peter Benchley, who died two years ago, had grown increasingly dedicated to ocean conservation issues.

" 'Jaws' was a novel out of his imagination and from research," she said. "He did not create fear of sharks; they have been feared for millennia."

Today's concern is that sharks are increasingly outnumbered. Humane Society literature cites a 2003 study indicating that all recorded shark species, with the exception of mako, have decreased by more than 50 percent in the last eight to 15 years.

James disputes the study, saying shark populations are declining because of commercial fishing operations. In the last several years, shark-fin soup has become an expensive and popular delicacy in China.

"Does anyone believe the federal government would allow me to take a fish that's endangered?" James said. "They'd shut me down quickly and with handcuffs on."

Sympathy for sharks may be hard won. Oak Bluffs officials said they have received no phone calls from people who want to cancel the shark tournament, although they have received a steady stream of form-letter e-mails from people visiting the Humane Society website.

Town Administrator Michael Dutton said that the event is a big money-maker for island businesses and that he thinks it will continue this year. Other than noise complaints and the time when a fisherman attempted to mount a shark's head on his vehicle, there have been few problems.

Dutton was a teenager living on Martha's Vineyard when the movie "Jaws" came out and admitted that its imagery lingers.

"Honestly?" he said. "I do think of it every time I go in the water."