Shark Fishing in San Francisco Bay
Aug 2nd, 2010 | By Hank Shaw | Category: Fish, Hunting & Fishing Stories | Comments | 28 Comments |
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Tick tick tick tick… My ears pricked up when I heard the clicker on the reel awaken. A shark? Maybe. Tick tick tick tick… tick tick tick… BZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!
The line screamed off the reel as the shark swam away with the bait. It was my turn at the reel, so I picked up the rod and pointed it at where the mystery shark was headed. Wait for it… wait… wait until he eats the bait. Set the hook and reel!
A little too easily. My heart sank. The shark was hooked, but it was no monster. Damn. Fishing for sharks in San Francisco Bay is a crapshoot. You could hook a monster seven-gilled shark, which can grow beyond 12 feet. Or, more often, you hook soupfin or leopard sharks, and this was what was on the end of my line now.
Strong, yes. Willful, too. But no great giant. I guessed maybe three feet long at best. Nothing like back East, where we used to lay into mako sharks off the Long Island coast. Makos are fast, mean and tasty. Fishing for a mako shark is the only instance I know of in which each end of the rod and reel wants to eat the other. I’ve hooked makos larger than 10 feet, and landed eight-footers. One took me 90 minutes to fight to the side of the boat.
No, this little shark was nothing like that mako. As I reeled, the leopard came into view. Such a pretty fish. You can see why they call them leopard sharks.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Sharks evoke primal feelings within us. We are creatures of open plains who like to see everything that’s around us. Deep forests and the hidden depths of the ocean frighten us. Sharks live in those depths, and some sharks eat people. To be eaten alive is just about the worst fear anyone has, and I’ve had a few encounters with the Man in the Gray Suit, as great whites are so euphemistically called. Even safely aboard a boat, however, seeing one cruise alongside, staring at you with those doll’s eyes, is chilling.
But there are sharks and there are sharks. It’s illegal to catch white sharks now — we need more of them to control the goddamn salmon-eating sea lions — so those of us inclined toward shark fishing have targeted smaller, tastier sharks for years. There was once a large soupfin shark fishery in California, and our captain this day, Barry Canevaro, fished leopard sharks commercially years ago. No longer.
As many of you know, most shark populations are in steep decline. Overfishing and the immoral practice of finning live sharks just for that nasty gelatinous soup, added to the slow growth rate of the species, have hit the fish hard. I no longer will buy them in the store because I don’t think sharks can handle a commercial fishery anymore.
But there are still enough sharks in the San Francisco Bay for a hook-and-line fishery, although Canevaro wisely sets a two-shark limit on his boat — even though the state allows three sharks per angler.
The first of our sharks decided to get himself wrapped up in everyone else’s line as I got him near the boat. But Canevaro got it over the rail and into the boat. Even a small shark won’t stop fighting once it’s on the deck. This is no meek trout or panfish. You need to dispatch a shark with a swift blow to the head, or it will thrash around and potentially bite you – although leopard sharks lack the razor teeth of a seven-gilled shark.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Once it’s dead, you need to gut a shark right away to keep the meat clean and fresh. This is vital. Most people won’t eat sharks because they think they taste awful, like ammonia; another piece of the shark taboo. And it’s true. If you don’t take care of a shark once it’s aboard, the meat can stink.
Properly handled, however, shark meat is white, firm and surprisingly juicy. It tolerates a little overcooking the way codfish will not. Shark is firm, but not as dense as swordfish or sturgeon, and it is more tightly flaked than most fish. Skinning one is a bitch, though — they do in fact tan shark skin for boots and such.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
I’ve eaten plenty of spiny dogfish in my day, so I was looking forward to eating this leopard shark. Dogfish used to be ubiquitous on sandy bottom anywhere from North Carolina to Maine, but even they have come under pressure in recent years. I was once the only person on the boat who would keep my sharks. Now some party boat captains will even advertise that they fish for them. Times have changed.
Leopard sharks were a mystery to me, however. I’d first heard of them when I moved here six years ago because like the dogfish now, charter captains actually advertise that they fish for leopards, along with soupfin and seven-gilled sharks. They must be tasty, I thought. But for some reason I’d never gone out for them.
Until last week. We fished in shallow water, using salmon roe or an ugly fish called a midshipman for bait. Shark fishing is a lot like it was depicted in “Jaws.” You bait hooks, put the reels in free-spool with a clicker on, then you sit around and talk all day, waiting for the tick, tick, tick of the clicker. Fishing was slow but not terrible, and we caught four good leopards for the six of us on the boat.
On to the eating.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Finding shark recipes is not that easy. Yes, traditional British fish and chips is often done with shark — and I like fish and chips, but I wanted something a little more refined than that for my first taste of leopard shark. I learned the Spanish eat a similar shark, calling it tiburon, while the Italians call their version palombo.
I saw a reference to something like this first dish in, oh, I-can’t-remember-where. All I could remember is that it was a cutlet of shark served with a mushroom sauce. The cutlet is easy: Just portion some shark, dust it in flour and saute.
I wanted my shark with mushroom sauce to be kinda fancy, however, so I soaked dried chanterelles, porcini and morels, cooked them with some homemade tomato sauce, added the mushroom soaking water — then buzzed it all in a blender. Thick, pretty, and very, very mushroomy. I really like the combination of mushrooms and seafood, although at first glance it sounds counter-intuitive.
I could eat that sauce all day. It was just as good over toast as it was with the fish, and I plan on using the leftovers for pasta.
For something simpler, I went Spanish, with a simple saute of shark with pine nuts, tomatoes and smoked paprika.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
This dish is da bomb. Again, I dusted chunks of shark in flour and fried them in olive oil. I mixed this in with toasted pine nuts, Roma tomatoes, garlic, parsley and some Spanish smoked paprika. A splash of white wine moistened everything, and boy oh boy was this good! I think the key was to not cook the tomatoes any longer than they needed to get warm; they were still firm enough to stab with a fork.
These recipes are repeatable if you catch your own sharks — and if you make them, you will not be sorry. But if you don’t fish for sharks, or are not an angler, you can still make these dishes. Just switch up your fish. For the Spanish dish, I’d recommend substituting sturgeon, swordfish, tilefish, white seabass, monkfish or tautog — something really firm. For the shark with mushroom sauce, really any white fish would do.
MORE ON SHARKS
- Indian Shark Curry, from Simply Spicy
- Another Spanish take on shark, from Spanish Recipes
- More about Leopard Sharks, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium
While lauching a boat out of Sausalito on my lone visit to SF Bay back in 2005, I crossed paths with a charter boat captain returning from a day fishing for stripers and leopard sharks. At the time I was a bit turned off by the idea of anyone targeting and keeping sharks…then the captain handed me a chunk of smoked leopard shark he had left over from lunch. Long story short, I eat shark now.
So glad you posted about this!! I wonder if the spiny dog fish you mentioned, are like the dog fish we have up here in the Puget Sound…
If so…
Nice! I used to love to load up on sharks in NC. Sandbar sharks, spiny dogfish, blacktips, and the occasional bull shark made up the usual suspects. OK, since I mostly fished out of small boats (14-18′), loading up usually meant a couple of four-footers or one big shark. Pulling an eight-foot blacktip into a 14′ jon-boat made for quite the adventure… even after dragging it backwards by the tail. You didn’t do that more than once or twice in a morning.
In the last couple of years before I left NC (early 90s), the shark catch really started drying up. My sure-fire spots stopped producing altogether, due to overfishing and shrimp trawlers. It’s still way too common to see fishermen pull a shark in, curse, kill it, and dump it over the rail.
It’s kind of a shame, because shark is my favorite eating fish. I love fresh dolphin, and it’s hard to beat a grouper, speared in the morning and cooked up for dinner… but there’s something about the taste and texture of shark meat that really works for me.
Glad to hear there’s still some semblance of a shark fishery around here.
I’m speaking as someone who has mostly given up the big fish high on the food chain – isn’t small a good thing as far as mercury and other contaminants?
Carolina: You might have seen Captain Barry, then! He fishes around Sausalito. Was it a red boat?
Adam: Yep, we get spiny dogfish in San Francisco Bay, too. Very edible. Flavor is supposed to be the same as the Atlantic dogfish, but I’ve not yet eaten a Pacific one.
Phillip: That is quite the Old Man and the Sea experience! Never landed a fish more than half the size of my boat before. You should come over for some shark sometime.
Jon W: All things in moderation. The whole mercury thing really only matters if a) you are a pregnant woman or young kid, b) you eat a whole lot of the big fish. In general, yes, small fish are lower in contaminants, and I mostly eat them. But eating shark, tuna, et al once in a while — even once a week — is not going to affect you unless, again, you are pregnant or really young.
I don’t know if I have ever eaten shark. And it has been many moon since I have reeled in my own fish. Loved your account. Makes me want to put up the ‘Gone Fishin’ sign.
The very first time I ever had shark was a mako. It had been grilled medium rare, like a steak, and it was a*w*e*s*o*m*e.
Every shark dish since then has been entirely forgettable. But not that first one.
Really? Gutting them asap solves whatever issues I’ve heard about? I’ve caught a lot of dogfish off the west coast up here, but heard they needed to be soaked, and that only certain adventurous individuals would eat them. Glad to hear that may be a load of crap.
What a beautiful fish! I love knowing that things like that swim around.
They sound tasty, too.
[...] bloodstream contaminates the meat, so it’s destined to be lobster bait. (For more on sharks, read Hank Shaw’s post at Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. If we all ask him nicely, I’m hoping he’ll tell us how to gut [...]
How timely is this?! It was just yesterday that I pulled up a spiny dogfish and popped it in the cooler, determined to experiment with it. When I got it home, though, I discovered that it had to be gutted and bled right away, or the uric acid in its blood (sharks don’t have a proper urinary tract; they pee through their skin) will contaminate the meat. So that dogfish is lobster bait, but another should be easy to come by (we threw several back).
Here’s the thing. I have no idea how to gut and bleed a shark. Last night, looking at that dofish, regretting my mishandling of it, I actually said to my husband, “I’m going to have to ask Hank. I bet he knows.”
Sure nuff. So I’m asking. How do you process the thing?
[...] Catching and eating leopard sharks in San Francisco. [Hunter Angler Gardener Cook] [...]
I remember a red hull…can’t remember his name. Nice guy. He went out of his way to fill me in on the history of the SF Bay fishery.
Kevin: Yes, gutting them and bleeding a shark immediately cures a multitude of ills. Most sharks will be “clean” tasting if you do that, but some might still need a night’s soak in salt water or milk.
Tamar: You would have been fine. The meat quality would suffer a bit, but a 24 hour soak in milk or salty water would fix it. Next time:
– Kill the shark with a blow to the head when you catch it.
– Slice to the “bone” in front of the tail to bleed it.
– Gut immediately, and remove the gills.
– Ice down.
– To fillet, treat it like any other fish, although it has really tough skin.
Carolina: I bet that was Barry!
Tamar, I’ve gotta concur with Hank. It was several sharks before I learned that the ammonia smell (uric acid) wasn’t a necessary part of shark fishing. I used to toss them in the cooler, fish all day (in NC heat), and clean fish at night. I’d soak them in milk overnight and the meat was always fresh and sweet. The biggest problem I had was that the smell often lingered in my nose (or in my imagination), so I’d smell it even though my dinner guests didn’t. I seldom ate sharks the same day I caught them.
Once I learned what I was doing wrong, though, that ceased to be a big deal. Gutting them over the rail is definitely the way to go… and done right away, it makes excellent chum for more sharks!
Awesome post.
Re: shark for food, and specifically spiny dogfish, I’d always like what I saw (massive amounts of white, boneless meat) but not what I tasted (urea). Hunted around the net and came up with instructions for processing shark, based out of Australia. It works, and looks like this:
As soon as the shark/dogfish is in the boat, cut down through the back of the head, through the spine, until you reach the gut (from the top). Turn your knife back and cut along the top of the gut cavity all the way back, so that the entire gut cavity and gut is cut out. Of course, this take care of killing the fish. You can save the belly flaps because apparently they are fantastic smoked and eaten alongside a cold lager…it’s a German thing.
Cut off the fins but not the tail; the tail makes a good handle for skinning. So long as the shark is fresh, it’s easy to skin, but if you leave it past the twitching stage, which lasts about twenty minutes sans head, the skin gets very hard to remove. It comes off in strips like you’re ripping sandpaper.
You’ll be left with a meat “post” that’s very tasty. As an aside, I turned mine into fish cakes by boiling the chunks in water and then skimming off the extremely gelatinous grey fat with a steak knife. I then flaked the fish and mashed it, seasoned, binder, yadda yadda. What pissy taste remained came off with the fat.
Next one will be turned into shark fin soup. BTW this is an interesting one for kids and everybody, because the heart will beat and the meat will twitch for hours afterwords.
nice post Hank. Here in Gibraltar we east dogfish in ‘adobo’. The fish is marinated in garlic, olive oil, sherry vinegar, paprika, cumin and oregano, then dusted with flour and deep fried. tasty!
incidentally Hank, a while back you asked about fishing in Gibraltar. Well, check out this post about a 130 kilo Bluefin caught in the Strait of Gibraltar, near to Tangiers. A rare treat: http://www.mymediterraneandiet.net/2010/07/my-outrageously-tasty-double-standards_29.html
What gorgeous sharks! Their coloring is just beautiful.
We’d sometimes catch small black tips in Mobile Bay, but we never kept them. There were a few restaurants in that area that served shark, but most everyone stayed away b/c of the reputation the meat had. I’ve had it once when my uncle ordered a plateful drenched in some type of stewed sauce. Though itt didn’t taste of ammonia, I found it too fibrous and bland for my taste…though you are right about it resembling cod. But I suppose if anyone could make shark tasty, it’d be you.
Beautiful looking fish! I’ve always tossed back the dogfish we inadvertently catch (sometimes you see them cruising right along the shoreline during salmon season, gobbling up the salmon guts left by beach anglers) but might reconsider next time, if it’s legal to keep. That dish with tomatoes and paprika looks awesome.
Great post.!
I’ve eaten shark steaks, grilled like swordfish – good eating. Smoked shark sounds pretty good as well.
This is an awesome post. Those sharks are quite adorable–I’ve never seen such small, thin sharks before.
Also love the recipe. I’ve made cod a few times dusted in flour and plopped atop a piperade sauce–basically what you’ve done here, but with the addition of red bell peppers.
Thanks for the great recipe!
Phoebe
[...] him to Jim and Dennis, I called him “the Bear Grylls of the culinary world”. From fishing for leopard sharks in San Francisco Bay to making venison sausages to sipping cider brewed from manzanita berries he picked himself, he is [...]
Do you think shark fishing in the Bay Area will be banned soon due to depletion of shark populations world wide? I have read that the population of all shark species have been decreased by 90% and that between 80 to 90 million sharks are killed each year primarily for shark fin soup.
Conrad: No, I don’t think it will be anytime soon. Leopard sharks are not endangered, unlike many other sharks, and the fishing pressure on them isn’t that high. You are right that many, many shark populations are hurting, but leopards are fine. For now…
One way to try to save the sharks is to build a ship that machine filets the shark while at sea. The loins would then be vacuum packed and frozen(we receive sushi-grade tuna loins this way)
If we could show a profitable way to sell shark to seafood markets maybe we could convert some shark finners.
Fished for sharks in the bay a few times and have caught leopards, dogfish, seven-gills, and threshers. Never had a problem with uric acid. We cut into the flesh just above the tail and this facilitates the expulsion of that acid.
Shark fishing also results in hooking rays. I’ve caught 60 lbers. Like playing tugowar with Warren Sapp. Tough to butcher too. The ray, not Warren. He’d probably be tough to bucher too come to think of it.
[...] last dish consisted of panko and pepper encrusted guitarfish with nuts and tomatoes. The guitarfish meat was first placed in an egg bath, and then coated with a black and white pepper [...]