Massachusetts Sharks In Our Archives

Eddie Fairweather be havin' fish or dinner!

We've been very Nature-oriented this summer. This pattern will continue, as several ideas we're kicking around involve oysters, foxes, bluefish, owls, stripers and God knows whatever else walks/swims/flies in front of one of our cameras.

You're going to get all of that soon enough, but today we're going to issue a recap/filler article about our toothiest locals. Great White Sharks own the news around here, even though more people are hurt by schnauzers than sharks in Massachusetts.

This will be our tenth article devoted to sharks, not a bad total at all for a publication in a region with an 100 day swimming season.

Rather than make you wade through our archives for some good ol' fashioned Shark Talk, we're going to give you a list of these articles for you to peruse easily from this very location here.

If you get through all of this and still need more Shark in your life, you should probably just open a wound in your skin and jump into the waters off of Monomoy. We probably have a few Shark articles lurking on Cape Cod TODAY or perhaps even AOL, but this is everything for which we'll get paid if you read it.

Apologies in advance if you see us re-telling a few stories or even telling the same story twice with different details. We have several authors on this site, and occasional short circuits will occur.

What If? A Cape Cod Shark Attack Fatality

I'm very much in Mayor Vaughn's camp on this one, as I feel that a fatal Outer Cape shark attack caught on video would end Cape Cod's status as a vacation destination.

We were actually wrong about this, at least as far as we have been able to prove. Sharks have attacked a couple of people in Truro and also said howdy-do to a couple of kayakers in Plymouth. It seemed to have no negative effect at all on the Cape's tourist flow.

Aim high, fall far.

Historical Massachusetts Shark Attacks

If you want to know your odds, you have to get the stats.

Location is everything in this category, too. Someone who had done no research most likely would not be able to guess where our three shark attack fatalities went down in the Bay State.

We branch out to include Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut and New York.


Great White Shark Spotted Off Duxbury Beach

This, and the Plymouth attack, brought it all home to the Irish Riviera that sharks are not solely the problem of Cape Cod. You're more likely to be killed by a shark on the bay side of Cape Cod than you are on the ocean side, and the same goes for the South Coast.

This was a brief article, written the instant I heard the news,and more of a warning to my friends and family who live on that beach. If I go to Thanksgiving and have to sit with a one-legged niece with a very personal Duxbury shark attack story, I will very much need my "Well, you should have checked my site updates" guilt-block.

Best line? "Wow, and I thought that Duxbury didn't get Cape traffic."


Ol' Toothy, The Kayak Eating Shark Of The Irish Riviera

We discuss a theory of ours, focusing on the possibility that Cape Cod Bay only had one shark. That's why we named him. We had some theory that he was a rogue, who split away from his posse off Chatham for some reason that probably makes perfectly good sense to a shark.

This theory, like many of my theories, was wildly off-base. Shark tagging and receiver buoys proved me wrong pretty much right away.

I'm pretty sure that this article at one point also included a Stacey-conducted interview with the shark who dumped those two girls out of the kayak off Manomet. We may have had to remove the interview, as the shark's frank talk on race (he prefers white meat) and age (he steals a Mark Leyner joke about brittle-boned/osteoperosis-having old people being crunchier to the shark) would have been  upsetting to a greater portion of our readership.

Best line? "I'm assuming that the shark was male. Boats are girls, Sharks are boys. That's how I roll."

How To Not Get Eaten By A Shark

This is important stuff to know if you plan to go into the water. In short, if it is at all possible to be attacked by a shark, there must exist steps which will lower those odds.

Some advice ("Don't swim where people are fishing") makes sense. Other advice ("Do nothing at all seal-like") we play off as a joke when the advice is actually sound. One ("Swim with people fatter than you") sounds like a joke but was not denied when I approached a nationally-known shark expert for his thoughts about my theory. Yet another ("Be local" ) is true factually, but true in a category with a body of evidence small enough to magnify coincidence.

"Follow these rules, and you'll have mad bread to break up. If not, 17 feet on the wake-up."


Sharks In Cape Cod Bay

Speaking of shark experts, we went to Duxbury  to attend a lecture by shark expert Dr.Gregory Skomal. He's the guy you see on te news, tagging sharks.

We got to ask him all of our stupid questions ("Have you ever met a friendly, seems-to-enjoy-hanging-with-people Great White Sharks?" and "Can you make a Great White Shark do tricks?"), and we got to hear more serous people ask more serious questions.

I'm pretty sure that I'm the only journalist on Earth to ask a shark expert, at length, to weigh in on Dr. Hooper's territoriality theory from Jaws. It turns out that true Territoriality involves one shark claiming an area and driving off other sharks, something which isn't happening around here.

Written during a blizzard, I might add.


Where Exactly Do Our Great White Sharks Hang Out?

Dr. Skomal's efforts do give us some amazingly valuable information. We know where they go in the winter, and we also know where they go when they are up here.

This article tells us where sharks were registered as having swam to. It also tells you how many (tagged) sharks are working any particular stretch of coast.

This is another wake-up call for the South Shore and even the North Shore. Sharks show up from Cape Ann to Cape Cod.

Cape Cod holds the title, no doubt. While Plymouth, Scituate and Duxbury combined for 200 shark tag signals, Chatham had over 14,000 in that same period. Granted, Dr. Skomal spends his days tagging off of Chatham and may never have set foot on the South Shore, 14,000 to 200 is a pretty wide gap.


Can Orcas Chase Our Sharks Away?

This was actually our last article. If you're reading this, you most likely read that. It involves yet another theory of mine.

I still think that a robotic Orca could be employed by Outer Cape towns to drive away the sharks. even if it didn't, there must be some cool use for a 40 foot mechanical Killer Whale.


Deep-Sea Surfcasting Methods

I think that this article, concerning inventions we're working on to allow even novice fishermen to make casts out to sea that would fly completely over small towns if they casted towards land, gets into shark-fishing at some point.

Our best idea involves hooking a shark with a chain that is attached to a Jeep. Dr. Skomal somehow was able to avoid my question about a huge shark taking on a Jeep in a tug-o-war.

Can Killer Whales Chase The Sharks Away From Cape Cod?

Old Thom, the Chatham Whale... photo from Capeshores Charters

In case you haven't heard, Cape Cod has a shark problem. It's not really a "problem," and is in fact a sign of a healthy ecosystem, but a tourist-dependent beach destination with Great White Sharks offshore is a soon-to-be non-destination. All it would take is one fatal shark attack on a human to get the ball rolling.

There's not much we can do about it that doesn't involve a wanton act of mass-production animal cruelty. A mass culling of the Cape Cod seal population would be needed, as seals are what the sharks come for. We could also kill the sharks, which are currently protected under federal law.

Or we could just let nature take her course, as people say. Nature works in many mysterious and wonderful ways, and one of these Ways may be taking place just offshore.

A charter fisherman about ten miles off of Chatham spotted an Orca yesterday. We don't mean Quint's doomed boat when we say "Orca," we mean "Killer Whale." It most likely wandered down from the Bay of Fundy, and is relatively unusual in Cape Cod waters.

Another thing that was unusual for a long time on Cape Cod was the presence of a multitude of Great White Sharks just offshore. However, this soon (and by soon, we mean "a couple of years") considered to be the new normal. Why not Orcas?

Orcas do come to New England. The Coast Guard cutter Campbell came across a pod of killer whales about 150 miles off Nantucket in 2014. Experts blame melting Arctic ice and associated whale-food-related problems.

"Don't tell Old Thom that I'm here, OK?" (photo, by our England correspondent Jodi Turck, of seals off Clacton-on-Sea, England)

I'm no marine biologist, but I read 30 minutes of whale stuff, and I'll tell you what I gained from it.

- The whale in question is almost certainly Old Thom, a whale who tends to stray from his fellow killer whales up in Labrador and Newfoundland. He has been spotted in the Bay of Fundy a few times recently.

- Old Thom is about 30 feet long and weighs 8 tons.

- Old Thom comes from a population of whales who don't hunt seals. His peeps prefer to hunt and eat dolphins and Minke Whales. His fellow whales are Specialists, which means "whales that only eat one kind of food."

- This sort of takes the steam out of "Maybe the killer whales will eat all of the seals and end our associated Great White Shark problem."

- A Dr. Hamilton at the New England Aquarium scoffed at the idea of sharks and whales doing the Batman vs Superman thing off of Monomoy. He laughed and said "Maybe in fantasy land" when the Boston Globe asked him about it.

- Scientists laughed and said "Maybe in fantasy land" fifteen years ago if you asked them about Great White Sharks making a summer home off Cape Cod.

- Cape Cod has adequate dolphin and Minke Whales (named for Meincke, a Norwegian sailor who mistook one for a Blue Whale and has been goofed on ever since over it) population to keep Old Thom very well fed.

- Minke whales are usually what you see if you go on a Cape Cod whale watch.

- I have no idea if any (or how many) Minke Whale beachings were a Minke choosing suffocation over being eaten by an Orca.

- Though not listed as an Orca food item, a Beluga Whale got itself into the Taunton River in Fall River and hung out for a few days in 2014. Killer Whales have been spotted upriver in Japan and even in the Columbia River in the US.

- A whale who specializes in seals may not even recognize a fish as a food item, and the same probably goes for whales who eat other whales.

- From what I have gathered, it would be very unusual for Old Thom to buck evolution and change his diet to seals.

- Still, Old Thom could be useful. The one thing that a Great White Shark fears is a Killer Whale.

- Orcas can and do eat anything they want. There are cases of a pod taking out a juvenile Blue Whale. Adult sperm and blue whales are the only whales that an Orca wouldn't cross. Even a large adult GWS is no match for an Orca.

- This website once jokingly suggested that we solve Cape Cod's shark problem by building robot killer whales to patrol the coast off of popular resort beaches. It looks like we could get to test that theory out.

- Several instances have been recorded where an Orca killed a Great White Shark. I have never read of a GWS beating an Orca, and I'll let you know right now that I am researching a future article (tentatively called "Massachusetts Animal Fights: Who Wins?") on which animals in our region can whip ass on which other animals. "Great White vs Orca" just went to the top of that article.

- An Orca holds several advantages on a Great White Shark in a fight. They are almost twice as long as a GW, and often weigh 4-8 times as much as one. Orcas hunt in packs, and will focus on a big fish like a shark if they wish. They are much stronger. They are also much more intelligent, using an amazing knowledge of shark biology when fighting one.

- In combat, an Orca who gets a hold of a GWS will turn it upside down. This induces a state of paralysis called "tonic immobility" in the shark, who is then torn to pieces by the Orca. A victorious Orca will eat only the liver of the shark, and let the rest of the carcass sink to the bottom.

- A tagged Great White Shark who was in a group of sharks that a pod of Orcas attacked off the San Francisco area was observed to immediately dive to 500 feet and swim non-stop to Hawaii.

- Again, Old Thom isn't from a population that A) eats sharks or B) eats seals, which would put Old Thom into competition with sharks.

- Our sharks here on Cape Cod may or may not know that.

- If Old Thom gets closer to shore and smokes a Porker, it may drive other Great Whites away.

- Old Thom poses almost no threat to humans, with one huge exception. To my knowledge, there have been three attacks on humans by an Orca.

- One involved an Orca bumping a child who was swimming. The child was uninjured.

- Another case involved a whale biting a bag of fish that a diver had tied to his arm, and he dragged the diver around for a minute.

- A surfer at Port Sur, California was bitten and released by an Orca, and this is the only case documented where a wild Orca attacked a human. The surfer required 100 stitches.

- These three incidents are all that they have documented. Killer Whales range all over the world, and only three attacks have been recorded on humans... and only one of them was a "real" attack.

- An Orca in captivity is a different story. Dozens of trainers have been attacked. Even the well-known Shamu bit a woman, giving her 200 stitches.

- I have never heard of nor have I been able to find any documentation of Killer Whales in Cape Cod Bay. Larger whales than the Killers wash upon South Shore beaches all the time.                                

- The chances that a pod of Killer Whales will colonize New England is very small, but not impossible, Killer Whales roll in pods, and it must take a bit of convincing to get them to say "Screw Newfoundland and Minke Whales... let's go to Cape Cod and start eating seals."

- If a pod of Killer Whales took up residence on Cape Cod, however, they would stand a good chance of scaring our sharks away. We would then get an Apex Predator Upgrade, with the added bonus of losing an AP that attacks humans and gaining one that will only attack you if you try to force him to bounce a ball on his nose at Sea World.

- Great White Sharks vs Orca is probably not going to be happening here, but it is something to think about if we start seeing more of Old Thom and his buddies in the waters off of Monomoy.

Something else may be targeting him soon....

The Dirty Dozen: The Most Dangerous Places On (Or Just Off) Cape Cod

South Beach, Chatham

"Ahhhhh... nice beach here.... soft sand, warm water, clean air... think I'll take a swim. Oh, look! A seal! What's that shadow swimming next to him?"

Due to the cycle of the sea, seals began hanging out in large numbers off Chatham. After that, it becomes simple algebra.... sharks eat seals, seals hang out at Chatham, so therefore...

A great white shark goes 10-20 feet long and can bite a human being in half. If he's not looking that closely or if he's really hungry, we look kind of like seals in the right (wrong) light.

The last fatal shark attack in the general area was off Mattapoisett in 1936, but sharks are more prevalent now than at any point locals can remember.

To be fair to the sharks, humans are out on their turf. You can't blame one for wanting to try some People Food now and then.

Suicide Alley

A nasty stretch of Route 6 turns to 2 lanes- one East, one West. You're on a divided highway, but then cars start coming at you from the other lane. It's disconcerting. Suicide Alley runs 13 miles, from exit 9A in Dennis all the way to Orleans.

I don't think any other stretch of road has a worse reputation on Cape Cod, and no other ones have such an ominous nickname.

If someone from Cape Cod says "There was this terrible head-on accident..." someone else from Cape Cod will usually finish with "Suicide Alley?"

If other states have a Suicide Alley, they are not respected by Google. I saw no other Alley mentioned.

 Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant

It's actually a fairly nice part of the state... coastal, beachfront, in the pines. It's not melting down or anything, and any leaks presently are low-key. They have a lot of spent nuclear waste sitting around (in overloaded storage facilities), and they can't find anyone to take it off their hands.

However... the worst case scenario actually makes this the top risk in the general area. Imagine a massive accident there? With almost all winds imaginable, the radioactivity released could blanket Cape Cod.

At that point, Cape Cod becomes Cape Chernobyl. Farming would be viable in Sandwich in about 20,000 years.

Granted, Pilgrim's time is almost up, but it is still a big radioactive elephant in the room for this discussion.

The Wedge, Hyannis

The low-income area around the Cape Cod mall is notorious for violence.

"The Wedge" aka "The Triangle" aka "Captains Quarters" is a hot spot in Hyannis.

If you wish to buy drugs from someone in a sh*tty house who might be involved in a shooting later, you can do worse than the Hyannis Triangle.

You have a nice mix of poor people, homeless people, hard-drinking people, a lively drug trade and the Cape's only Gangsta scene... albeit one about 3 miles from the Kennedy Compound.

The Wedge is known locally as "Brockton-by-the-sea."

PAVE PAWS, Bourne

PAVE PAWS is a United States Air Force Space Command radar system operated by Space Wing squadrons for missile warning and space surveillance.... and I pasted that right from Wikipedia, so go to them if you disagree.

People tend to bug out when there's a high powered radar installation nearby, as they fear the government pounding high-powered radar into their heads 24/7/365.

A mountain of studies have been conducted on PAVE PAWS. General studies have dismissed the threat of an elevated cancer risk (when they found elevated cancer rates near the Pilgrim Plant when I was a kid, they blamed it on smokers), although there does seem to be an elevated rate of Ewing's Sarcoma among those who live near the P Double.

Ewing's Sarcoma is a form of bone cancer that generally attacks the hips, ribs, arms and legs. It is most commonly found in male teenagers.

I should add that nothing is proven here, and it is nice to have an early-warning missile detection system in place.

Bourne/Sagamore Bridges, Rotaries

This is actually what I personally fear more than anything else on the Cape. I fear heights, and this is as high as it gets.

Off the top of my head (from a previous article), I know it's a 40 meter drop off the Bourne Bridge. You'd make the fall in 1.6 seconds, and smash into the water (or onto the bike path, although at that height there really isn't that much difference) at about 35 mph.

Even if you don't do a goodbye-cruel-world leap off the bridge (this section of either Route 6 or Route 28 is the real Suicide Alley), you can skid on ice, get hit by a drunk, maybe catch some air... the possibilities are limitless.

The bridges were built in 1935 (ironically, both of these suicide launching platforms were Great Depression projects) or so, and they could probably use an overhaul or ten.

Make it over the Bourne Bridge... you hit a rotary. Rotaries are a dying form of Road Intersection that basically dares the driver to force their way into a traffic circle that looks like a mini-Daytona at times. The reason that the Rotary is dying as an art form is that a rotary is fretty pucking dangerous.

Mitt Romney gets unusual praise from this column for ridding Earth of that Sagamore Bridge rotary.

Pollock Rip Channel, off Chatham

The reason they built the Cape Cod Canal was that it shortened the distance one had to sail from New York to Boston. It allowed sailors to not have to sail around Cape Cod.

The reason that people use Pollock Rip Channel is that it saves a sailor from having to sail around Nantucket.

The reason God made Pollock Rip Channel is that God- for reasons known only to him- wanted the Cape Cod Canal built.

Long known as a ship graveyard, Pollock Rip is an area of shifting sand that is always hungry and only eats boats. As recently as 1950, 8 fishermen died within sight of the lightship pictured here during a gale.

 Strong tidal currents flowing in and out of Nantucket Sound meet weather from the open ocean to generate conditions that range from merely disorienting to completely treacherous.

Shangri-La/Onset, Wareham

If Hyannis can truly support the dubious claim that she is "Brockton-by-the-sea," then Onset is "a baby New Bedford." I personally stretch this area out to include the run of crack motels on the Cranberry Highway.

Shootings, stabbings, drug-dealing, armed robberies gone wrong, beat-downs, stick-ups... Wareham has all of the benefits of small-town life.

Throw in a ton of Section 8 folks, a genuinely rotten economy, and BOOM goes the dynamite.

Wareham recently tried Operation Safe Streets, a massive episode of enhanced policing. While results have been mixed, at least they're trying.

Horseshoe Shoals

A ship-smasher of a spot that also was a good reason to build the Cape Cod Canal, Horseshoe Shoals is an area of shallow ocean that helps give Nantucket Sound her nasty reputation.

Horseshoe Shoals is too low to sail safely at low and medium tides (half the day, landlubbers). Horseshoe Shoals doesn't look like it's that far from land, but looks is deceiving, man. You don't want to have to swim to Chatham, even during the Great White Shark off-season.

This was also the proposed setting for the doomed Cape Wind project. A forest of turbines would have only added to the difficulty of sailing through that region.

Massachusetts Military Reservation, Bourne

You'd think that, after the thousands of men with machine guns leave, a place wouldn't be dangerous anymore. But the MMR turned out to be the gift that keeps giving.

You don't explode stuff and shoot depleted uranium rounds without screwing up the groundwater, it seems. Explosive constituents leeched through the soil and into the groundwater.

They removed 25,000 tons of soil in hopes of stopping the contamination, but you can have the first (and middle, and last) vegetables grown from that region, thank you.

The general area also holds the distinction of Most Dead Bodies, as they host a military cemetery. I'm working from a shoddy memory, but I think that there may be 40,000 people buried there.

The Irish Riviera

This is sort of a hodge-podge category. Once we truly get over the bridges and out of Barnstable County, the answers quickly become "Taunton," "New Bedford" and "Fall River." We'll try to keep it at least around Cape Cod Bay, and use a sweeping Irish Riviera categorization.

This will be more of an amalgamation of hard-drinking South Shore residents, a growing Great White Shark presence (the last local shark attack on a human wasn't off Cape Cod, it was off of Manomet, in Plymouth), a gaggle of elderly drivers and the teen-slaying, winding, poorly-lit roads.  

Certain parts of the South Shore (we're looking at you, Marshfield!) were very bad places to be Loyalist during the Revolution.

Duxbury, not Boston, holds the title of Last Drive-By Shooting Featuring A Prominent Rapper.

The Bridgewater Triangle

We've visited this area for the column a few times. It is also a case where, once we've gone this far inland, we should include places like "Brockton." However, the Bridgewater Triangle is in a class by itself.

For those of you who don't know, the Bridgewater Triangle (a term coined by paramormal poppa Loren Coleman) is a sort of Rankin Cluster of odd and sometimes paranormal happenings. This eerie sandwich is mashed into a lightly-populated section interior southeastern Massachusetts. They represent hard, though.

To my knowledge, they have both of the state's "known" Bigfoot sightings. You know... stuff like that.

The Triangle, which we think should be expanded to Cape Cod anyhow, sneaks onto this list (it is originally from a 2012 Cape Cod TODAY article) over former mainstays Pufferbellies, the Port 'o' Call, and the Woods Hole/Naushon Island current.

Chatham Hurricane Special

Chatham is, if you view Cape Cod as a big fist being shaken towards Europe, the Elbow. Like any other elbow, it's gonna get banged off things now and then. In this case, instead of a table, its a Hurricane.

There are no imminent storms, Chatham is just next up to bat in our ongoing series.

We have two maps from FEMA to check out today. The map above is a Hurricane Inundation map, and it depicts storm surge from a direct hit hurricane visiting Chatham at mean high tide. It also shows what sort of storm would be needed to soak certain regions, which we'll get to in a minute.

The map is from the combined efforts of FEMA, MEMA, NOAA and the NHC. They use the funny-weatherman-titled SLOSH model of storm surge estimation. They do not depict freshwater flooding.

The colors relate to the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, and break down like this:

Light Green = Category 1 hurricane. Hurricane Gloria was one of these, and the offshore Halloween Gale was, too. Although not a tropical system, the Blizzard of '78 did Cat. 1-style damage.

Dark Green = Category 2 hurricane. Hurricane Bob was one of these.

Yellow = Category 3 hurricane. We've only had five of these hit New England since the Other Man arrived in 1620, the most recent being Hurricane Carol in 1954.

Pink = Category 4 hurricane. We've had one in recorded New England history, and it struck in 1635.

Flesh = One Hundred Year FEMA Food Zone. This is the "100 year storm" you hear people speak of, but you have to go pre-Colombian to find them ("going pre-Colombian" means using salt marsh soil samples to look for sand layering associated with large hurricanes). New England has had storms in the Category 4+ level in the 1100s, the 1300s, and the 1400s.

Sorry about Flesh, but my knowledge of color names was and continues to be heavily influenced by whoever was in charge at Crayola in the 1970s.

Zoomed out... blurry, but anything unshaded is flooded....

We shall leave the street-by-street analysis to the reader, who can use the links I'll throw in at the end of the article to zoom in on their own house if it suits them.

Note that you don't need to be in a shaded area to get yourself a quick and sudden Ending. You can have a tree fall on you, have your car washed out in street flooding, step on a downed power line, get purged by looters, enjoy the Robespierre treatment from flying shingles, be summarily executed by National Guardsmen, or even stumble into a sharknado. There's no shortage of ways for you to get Left.

With that in mind, we now present to you the down-there-somewhere Evacuation Zone map.

Remember, you don't HAVE to leave when 5-0 tells you to. Also remember that the cop you read the Constitution to before the storm may be the one who has to fish you out of the drink when the ship hits the fan.

The E-map is easier to read, as it is made up of only two colors.

Red = Get Out.

Yellow = Get the f*** out.

Hurricane Inundation Maps

Evacuation Maps

Worst Hurricanes To Hit New England

List of all hurricanes to hit New England

FEMA

MEMA

NOAA

NHC