Saving Seafood

NORTH CAROLINA: Shark’s 8,500-mile odyssey ends on a fisherman’s hook

December 8, 2016 — A mako shark caught by commercial fishermen off North Carolina traveled more than 8,500 miles after a tracking device was attached 18 months earlier, an ocean research group says.

Researchers studying shark migrations for the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., attached the device to the female shark’s dorsal fin in mid-2015 near Ocean City, Md.

A donation to the institute by Heather Finke sponsored the tag in honor of Charlotte Latin School.

A commercial long-line fishing boat caught the shark near Manns Harbor last month. The last of the tag’s 265 data transmissions from the sea to an orbiting satellite was recorded on Nov. 24.

Data show the shark swimming up and down the East Coast (click mako sharks > W. North Atlantic > Charlotte) between North Carolina and Rhode Island, making one big loop into the Atlantic north of Bermuda last spring. It traveled an average of 15 miles a day over 557 days.

“We’re happy to have recovered the satellite tag, but disappointed about the loss of the mako,” said executive director Greg Jacoski of the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation, which supplies the tags. “It’s important for us to recover tags because of the value they have for our research efforts.”

Never Frozen: Why It’s So Hard to Find North Carolina Seafood

August 31, 2016 — JUST BEFORE sunrise in one of the last fishing villages on the Outer Banks, a widow stands at her back window and watches the lights from crab boats head into the bay, one by one. By this hour, she figures, her daughter must be about 150 miles west of here, on her way to Raleigh and Charlotte and Asheville with a load of cobia and Spanish mackerel and soft-shell crabs. Less than a mile away from the widow’s house— or, put another way, clear across the island—a woman wearing a mudstained Endurance Seafood T-shirt dives her hands into her family’s decades-old live boxes to see if any crabs shed their shells overnight. Nearby, her 82-year-old father pulls on his fluorescent yellow slicker.

When you step into the morning darkness on Colington Island, you can’t fake being from here or not from here. It’s evident in your accent, your look, your last name. On this Friday morning in May, in the middle of soft-shell crab season in the soft-shell crab capital of North Carolina, an outsider opens the door to his Chevy Suburban and slips into the leather seats. It’s 5:51 a.m., but the promise of a good day for his business hits him as he turns the key.

“Ah, yeah,” he says, “there’s that familiar smell.”

Two and a half years ago, Sean Schussler quit a six-figure job as vice president of sales for a printing company to start a seafood market. Catch On Seafood is a small shop in Plaza Midwood, a trendy Charlotte neighborhood where people drive eco-friendly cars with bumper stickers that read “Eat Local.”

Read the full story at Charlotte Magazine