Steve Fagin: No offseason for sharks on Cape Cod

Oct. 27—Three kite surfers were zipping through ocean waves off Cape Cod on a blustery afternoon last week, when one suddenly veered ashore, scrambled from his board and began waving frantically. His companions raced to join him seconds later.

"Great white!" the first surfer shouted. "Big one!"

Standing a few yards away on Coast Guard Beach in Eastham, Mass., I didn't see the shark, but did observe a large, dark shape slip below the surface. Was it a shark? A seal? A submerged log?

Having no desire to find out first-hand, I edged away from the water, reconsidered my plan to go for a swim, and strolled over to chat.

"We see sharks all the time," one of the surfers said. "They're always out there."

Asked if he ever thought about taking up a different sport, he shrugged and said, "They leave you alone — usually."

A few minutes later, he and his friends raised their parabolic kites with the wind and sailed back out into the surf, while I rejoined my wife, Lisa, for a stroll.

We were taking advantage of last week's spectacular weather to spend a couple days riding our bikes on the Cape Cod Rail Trail and visiting beaches on the Cape Cod National Seashore. Throngs of tourists clog these attractions during summer, but Lisa and I had the bicycle paths and shoreline largely to ourselves. We also paid about a quarter of the high-season rate for a hotel room in Wellfleet, a tiny village on the Outer Cape, about 30 miles south of the peninsula's northern tip in Provincetown. The hotel, like most businesses here, would shut down for the winter a couple days later.

There may be an extended off-season for humans on the Cape, but not so for sharks, thanks to warmer ocean waters and a population explosion of seals, the sharks' favorite food.

Not too long ago, sharks showed up infrequently in the Northeast and typically would migrate south in fall and winter. In recent years, though, Cape Cod has become an East Coast epicenter of shark activity, with countless sightings regularly documented by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, a research organization based on the Cape in North Chatham.

Maps of sightings track this surge on the Sharktivity app that the Conservancy developed with input from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the Cape Cod National Seashore, and officials from Cape Cod and South Shore.

More than a dozen recent, nearby sightings popped up when I checked the app on my phone later. While shark attacks are rare, they do happen; a surfer who was killed by a great white in 2018 off of Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet had been Massachusetts' first fatal shark fatality in 82 years.

After the movie "Jaws" terrified the nation in 1975, shark hunts became such a popular "sport," with the great white a much-coveted trophy, that they almost disappeared from the Northeast. The population began recovering after sharks were designated as a protected species in most federal waters in 1997.

Meanwhile, gray seals also had been hunted almost to extirpation from New England waters after Europeans arrived in the 1600s. The seal population recovered dramatically after Massachusetts outlawed the killing of seals in the 1960s, and the federal government expanded this prohibition in 1972 with passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Unlike harbor seals, which measure five to six feet long, weigh about 350 pounds, and frequently swim to Long Island and Fishers Island sounds in southeastern Connecticut from late fall until early spring, gray seals can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh more than 800 pounds. Because gray seals also have long snouts, they are sometimes called "horseheads."

Although the seals we saw off Marconi Beach in Wellfleet drifted to within only a few feet from shore and appeared to be unperturbed by our presence, Lisa and I kept our distance. Federal law prohibits people from getting closer than 50 yards to seals and other protected marine mammals.

Marconi Beach, incidentally, is named for the site where Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic wireless communication from the United States in 1903. The message, from U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to British King Edward VII, read, "In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American people most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and to all the people of the British Empire."

This missive is considerably more inspiring than Marconi's first wireless communication over open sea in 1897. Back then, the message, sent less than four miles over the Bristol Channel from Flat Holm Island to Lavernock Point near Cardiff simply read, "Are you ready?"

One other note of historic interest. The National Park Service reports on its website that the Pilgrims may have landed on what is now Coast Guard Beach in Eastham on Nov. 9, 1620, two days before they pulled ashore across Cape Cod Bay at Plymouth Rock.

Back then the beach was an unnamed stretch of sand; Henry David Thoreau later called it Great Beach. It was named Coast Guard Beach because the Massachusetts Humane Society was formed there in 1786, the nation's first organization charged with rescuing shipwrecked mariners. Since a storm drove the Sparrowhawk onto what is now nearby Nauset Beach in 1626, there have been more than 3,000 shipwrecks off Cape Cod.

Who knows — maybe one day they'll rename it Shark Beach.