Meet Alabama’s only full-time shark fishing boat — and the shark population is exploding

BON SECOUR, Ala. ( WKRG ) — The “Orca” out of Bon Secour is Alabama’s only federally and state-permitted commercial shark fishing vessel.

In only four hours on Tuesday, the boat had already caught its limit of sharks.

Fishing less than three miles off the coast of Dauphin Island, Apex Shark Fishing Charters uses a two-mile bottom-long line with 125 hooks.

“It allows us to fish a lot of gear off a long period of water,” and the “Orca” found her limit quickly.

“This is the only shark fishing boat that does it full time in the state of Alabama,” Lew Childre with Apex Shark Fishing said. “The oversight that has kept quotas down so low for so long. There is more than enough sharks to go around.”

Childre said that is one of the reasons the shark population has exploded.

“You have seen an increase in the shark population increase on the beach just due to the lack of fishing pressure and the presence of people, so there is more time interaction with people and the sharks that are there,” he said.

Sharks are migrating this time of year. Fifty species of shark call the Gulf of Mexico home. More than two dozen are common along the Alabama coast.

On a typical trip, the “Orca” lands a mixed bag of sharks: blacktips, spinners, finetooth, hammerheads and occasionally a bull shark.

During the summer, Capt. David Stiller can fish five days a week. In the fall, they move to federal waters catching as many sharks as the law allows.

Still, Childre says, there are plenty of sharks out there.

“They shouldn’t be afraid of them,” he said. “They should see them as a resource and a wonderful example of biology and ecology that we have.”

Once the catch is back at the docks, they are processed and all that shark meat is sold to markets in Canada and New York.

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