Photo courtesy of Dr. Kenneth J. Goldman, research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. A salmon shark leaps from the water with a prey fish in its mouth. Salmon sharks and sleeper sharks have been hooked in larger-than-usual numbers offshore from the lower Kenai Peninsula in Cook Inlet recently.
By Patrice Kohl
Redoubt Reporter
When Gary Deiman’s niece traveled from New York to visit Ninilchik in early June, he took her marine trolling for king salmon. Deiman has 30 years of trolling experience in the area, but what happened next surprised both the seasoned fisherman and his guest. Fishing from a small boat, using light salmon tackle and bait herring, Deiman’s niece hooked a salmon shark. Deiman estimates it was 9 feet long.
“It just rolled to the surface and I knew it was a salmon shark right away because of the size of it. It was just huge,” said Deiman, who is a setnet fisherman. “It was pretty exciting, that’s for sure.”
The shark bit the bait off his niece’s line three times, but got hooked the fourth time it went after her bait. They fought the shark for four hours and managed to get it up to the boat three times before it got away.
For Deiman and other members of his family who fish in the area, encounters with salmon sharks have been rare. But with respect to sharks, this year seems to represent a departure from previous years. Just the day before Deiman and his niece hooked a salmon shark, Deiman’s daughter, Kelsey Deiman, saw a salmon shark swipe a halibut off of a fishing line on a halibut charter boat on which she was working.
Fishermen in marine waters around Ninilchik and Anchor Point say encounters with sharks have been surprisingly common this year. Gary Deiman says that, in a usual year, he would expect to hear of a couple salmon shark landings over an entire summer. But this year he estimates there have already been three salmon sharks landed and another eight to 10 instances in which people have hooked salmon sharks.
Eric Skjold, who owns Nordic Alaska Saltwater Charters, said this year his charter hooked two salmon sharks and caught and released one. In the more than 10 years of chartering before this year, he has only caught one salmon shark and has not seen any others hooked. One of Skjold’s clients caught a salmon shark Wednesday, just as he had been reeling in a cod.
“We could just start to make out the fish, probably 20 feet down, and as we were reeling it in we saw a dark salmon shark come up and hit the tail end,” he said.
The shark shook its head, trying to tear the cod free while Skjold’s client reeled the cod and the shark closer and closer to the boat. The shark spooked and let go just before reaching the boat. Skjold’s client plunked the remaining cod back down and continued to play the same game with the shark until he finally hooked the shark and brought it to the boat.
Photo courtesy of Dr. Kenneth J. Goldman, research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. A biologist prepares to affix a tag to a salmon shark. The creatures can grow 9 feet in length.
Salmon sharks are not the only big sharks lower peninsula fishermen are seeing more of this year. While sportfishermen are catching unusually high numbers of salmon sharks, commercial halibut fishermen say they are pulling up unprecedented numbers of sleeper sharks.
Teague Vanek, a Ninilchik commercial halibut fisherman, said that until this year, he had not caught a sleeper shark for six or seven years. But this year he estimates he has caught between 15 and 20 of them. One day, he caught five on a single line. He said the sleeper sharks are usually too big for his halibut hooks to pull up and that if he was able to pull five of them up, there must have been about a hundred of them in the area at the time.
“I’ve never weighed one, but the crane on the side of my boat will lift 900 pounds and I know it won’t lift one of these,” Vanek said. “They’re really huge. They’re bigger around than a 55-gallon drum and they’re about 12 feet long.”
The fact that commercial halibut fisherman in lower Cook Inlet are catching sleeper sharks is not as surprising as reports that sportfishermen in the area are catching more salmon sharks, said Ken Goldman, a research biologist with Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Homer.
Troll surveys suggest sleeper sharks are generally abundant in Cook Inlet, whereas salmon sharks are not. A large number of sleeper sharks wouldn’t have to swim far to redistribute themselves to areas of the inlet where halibut fishermen may have not seen much of them in the past.
Although sleeper sharks may be relatively abundant in Cook Inlet, less is known about them than about salmon sharks and many other species of shark. Sleeper sharks tend stay close to the ocean floor, whereas salmon sharks swim within the entire water column. Sleeper sharks can grow up to 20 feet long, whereas salmon sharks usually grow to no more than 9 feet. But salmon sharks put up a bigger fight than the lethargic sleeper sharks.
Biologists don’t know at what age sleeper sharks mature, how frequently they reproduce or how old they can get to be. To age sharks, biologists sometimes count bands in shark vertebrae or otiliths — bony structures sometimes found in fish ears. But sleeper sharks do not have otiliths and have no banding patterns in their vertebrae.
There doesn’t seem to be any clear explanation as to why fishermen may be encountering more sharks in lower Cook Inlet. In addition to encountering more sharks, fishermen have also reported an unprecedented number of whale sightings in the area. Whale sightings include a group of gray whales that lingered close to shore for days on end, humpback whales, a pod of killer whales, possibly some fin and minke whales and others that could not be positively identified.
“It’s interesting and we’ve all got our eye on it, but we’re not sure what it means, if anything,” Goldman said.
Fish and Game herring surveys suggest a slight increase in the number of herring in the area, but not a major increase that would be expected to drive large numbers of salmon shark into the area. Although there is no research evidence pointing to an increase in shark populations in the area, biologists are intrigued by what they have been hearing from fishermen.
“They have the eyes on the water,” Goldman said. “We have our eyes on it some, but I always keep my ears open to what people who spend even more time than I do out there have been seeing.”
