b'movement that is at its core not politically partisan, the practice of hauling home, by truck or by boat, a 400 lb., bloody dead shark thats a pain in the ass in and out of the truck, and will only be thrown awaywho knows the hell wherebecause no one you love is going to clean and try to cook that ugly bastard, together was not a price worth paying for what amounted to a mad flex over Mother Natureespecially after 40 hours of no sleep at Big Shell and a two-hour ass-busting ride back home up the beach. Pardon my Bluffian.After all, the joy is in the hunt. Unless youre ready to spend two grand on a mount that youll get back next Christmas, or youre in the market for a shark skin suit, the fight with the wife just wasnt worth it. What if you could enjoy the hunt it-selfthe whole process including the comradery shared with your buddiesand kinda leave the sharks at the beach? Catch and release! And the environmentyes, of course! But mainly the environment.Even at its height of popularity before anyone cared about the fate, writ large, of sharks, hunting them from the surf on Padre Island had a minimal impact onAbove: A 12-foot, 800 lb. worldwide shark populations, especially compared to the wholesale, industrialHammerhead caught in the slaughter of sharks at sea across the worlds oceans. Two decades ago, a groupsurf off North Padre Island; of South Texas anglers organized the first Sharkathon, which has grown into theThis Image: The Shark Hunting Rig starts with a largest catch-and-release fishing tournament in the world, as were told, with al- jacked up 4X4, a tall fishing most a thousand teams competing for over $100,000 in cash and prizes over a longtower, kayaks to swim the weekend, each fall. bait out, built-in ice chests What I now know, which wasnt known when I wrote Jaws, is that there is no suchand tackle boxes, and one thing as a rogue shark [that] develops a taste for human flesh, said Peter Benchley,badass attitude; Below: Bull the author of Jaws, in a 2000 documentary on animal attacks. No one appreci- Shark landed in Sharkathon ates how vulnerable they are to destruction, he continued. Benchley had barelycompetition.finished his first novel, at age 27, when its manuscript had already been adopted into a motion picture screen play by Universal Pictures, which purchased the film rights for $175,000 before the book had been published. The two Universal pro-ducers called it the most exciting thing they had ever read and moved quickly into production in 1973.Steven Spielberg, the 26-year-old Universal director who was first hired by Corpus Christi native Sidney Sheinberg, had just finished his Texas-set thriller, The Sug-arland Express, before starting on Jaws. Spielberg was the third choice of director for the film, one kicked to the curb for repeatedly referring to the shark as a whale, but he actually tried to exit the contract at the last minute. Thankfully, for the sake of modern movie history, the producers vetoed the move, and Spielberg carried on to create the first summer blockbuster filmmuch to the eventual chagrin of ocean scientists and conservationists around the world.We could see the fear [Jaws] was stirring up, said Peter Benchley to National Geographic magazine, It was horrifying. Over the 1980s and 90s, the estimated populations of eight shark species declined by over 50% on the Atlantic Coast of the United States, where shark hunting by boat and from the surf became in-creasingly dominant in the world of sportfishing. While sharks are fun to catch, especially the jumping Mako, basic machismo motivated the hunting of them as much as anything elsethe instinct to believe that taking a big shark out of the ocean for good was making humankind that much saferadded a certain revelry to the recreation.No one in the world made a bigger name in the shark hunting business than Cap-tain Frank Mundus of Montauk, Long Island, New York, who wasunder a thin veil of controversythe inspiration for Captain Quint in Jaws, Except I didnt 100THECOASTALBENDMAGAZINE TheCoastalBend.com'