sticks and stones

The Mako shark is pound per pound the strongest shark there is. Although never reaching the length of the Great White, the Mako is the faster swimmer, and has a reputation of violently tugging at fishermen's hooks until either the line broke or the fisherman fell overboard. A small fishing boat, one story went, was attacked by the Mako they were trying to catch. It jumped right out of the water and into the boat, sending two of the three fishermen into the water. The shark landed on deck as the remaining fisherman's mind swiveled between panic and panic: to jump into the water, where there might be other sharks, or stay on deck and evade a wriggling 12-foot predator drowning in air, wildly trashing about, and rocking the boat.

Rescuers who came to the hysterical radio for help arrived five minutes later to find a silvery gray-blue corpse on deck. It had been dead a full three minutes, yet its tail continued to spasm and its jaws still twitched.

A report filed by the Coast Guard medic who talked to the fishermen who fell overboard said, "James Mathiessen, 34, truck driver by profession, was reported to have yelled in two directions, at the shark on deck, and in the direction of his friends in the water, at other sharks that might come by. John McMahon, 39, high school Physics teacher, and Mark Conneway, 32, car rental shop attendant, said that Mathiessen had yelled more at the shark that was never more than a foot away from him. He cursed it to the ends of the seas with all the insults he knew in his heart to be improper."

"We're thinking there's a correlation," Conneway said, with the dead shark fish-hooked and raised for display at the dock, where an awed audience stood. "James is undeniably more articulate than either of us [Mark]. I think that is what killed the shark and kept other sharks at bay."

"Our boat," McMahon, the other fisherman said, "is not a big one. If a Mako could jump right in and rock that boat hard, as it did, it could also flip itself overboard. But the more James screamed at it the less it struggled. It just writhed and withered and died.”

"I think," Mathiessen said, "I latched into every bad memory in my life and lashed it all on that thing, over and over. I feel lighter, somehow."

”We’re seriously thinking,” said Coast Guard Captain Harold Smith, “to require all fishing boats venturing the waters during shark-hunting season to have at least one very angry, very articulate person on board.”