November 1, 2015 — CHATHAM, Mass. — The summer crowds and traffic on Main Street were down to a trickle. Leaves sifted onto lawns, and the birdsongs and rattle and hum of insect life were stilled for another year.
As the Aleutian Dream nudged past rolling breakers at the mouth of Chatham Harbor, the ocean told another story. Rippling V’s of migrating waterfowl filled the skies. All around the vessel, spouts from fin whales on their way to the West Indies, pausing to gorge themselves on sand eels, burst into the air like escaping jets of steam. The inky black backs of minke whales, likewise headed for equatorial regions, jackknifed as they dived on the eels below.
Notably absent were the great white sharks that seemed omnipresent at summer’s end, closing town beaches from Orleans up to Wellfleet as they cruised close to shore, occasionally beaching themselves in their pursuit of seals in Harwich, Chatham and Wellfleet.
But tagging data going back to 2010 showed that most great whites were gone from the Cape by mid- to late October.
“It’s only the big slobs hanging out now,” joked state Division of Marine Fisheries shark scientist Greg Skomal. In the summer, average sizes hovered around the 12- to 13-foot mark, but most of the sharks they had encountered this fall were to 14 to 15 feet long.
Perched on a pulpit, a narrow catwalk jutting forward from the bow of the Aleutian Dream, Skomal eased his back onto the hard aluminum rail and stretched his legs, waiting for word from above. Despite the bright sunshine and blue skies, wispy high cirrus clouds foretold of the coming storm that likely would end what had been a record-breaking shark-tagging season.
Read the full story at Cape Cod Times