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Frank Mundus - Jaws Obituary
« on: 2008-10-05 00:45:11 » |
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[Fritz]Life imitates art ....
Source: The Economist print edition
Author: n/a
Date: Sep 25th 2008
Frank Mundus, shark fisherman, died on September 10th, aged 82
HIS boat was called Cricket II, not the Orca. But when you climbed on board, mentally noting the lumpy cushions, the rods trailing wires at the stern and the swivel fish-fighting chair bolted to the deck, you knew you were in the same place. His fishing methods were different: he used aluminium beer barrels as floats because wooden ones would break up in a minute, and rather than harpoons, with their stainless-steel darts that folded back and slipped right out of the fish, he preferred hand-held gaffs with a three-inch hook that went in and stayed there. But as you watched him work, dipping the ladle into a garbage pail of bloody chum and spreading a slick of it into the sea, or listened to him snapping at his customers to tighten the drag and hit the brake, you knew this was the same man. Frank Mundus was convinced he was Captain Quint, the fisher of monster sharks from Peter Benchley’s “Jaws”. And if Benchley denied it, as he always did, Mr Mundus was still determined to make a splash of his own.
The stories surrounding him were legion. That he had danced on the floating carcass of a dead whale while blue sharks, in a frenzy, foamed round it. (“I was the first one to stand on the whale and see if you could…get the sharks to take the bait; that whale was fresh, blood was still coming out of its mouth.”) That he had grabbed a thresher by the tail and pulled it into his boat. (“That tail is all muscle, and it knows how to use it. It can give you a bruise that looks as though you’ve been run over by a truck.”) That he had fed live kittens to sharks. (“No kittens. We tried ’em with a dead cat that we found on the road, but they didn’t want it.”) It was true, however, that he once grabbled a shark by the dorsal as it swam past the boat, and that another crashed up over the side and snapped its jaws three feet from his head. He was close enough to see the serrated edges on every three-inch tooth.
He had also caught, off Long Island, some of the largest sharks ever landed: a 4,500lb (2,000kg) great white harpooned in 1964, and a 3,400lb one, big as a Volkswagen, caught with rod and reel in 1986. The 4,500-pounder had swum up just after he had landed two sharks and was battling a third; it then took off for the horizon, needing five more irons to kill it. The 3,500-pounder resisted the first gaff for an hour and a half and thrashed for another hour before they got the tail-rope round it. Mr Mundus towed it into Amagansett at midnight to find crowds already waiting.
He wore a tooth from that shark round his neck ever after, as well as one big hoop earring and an Australian hat. Quint, who in the book wore a T-shirt and faded jeans and in the film had a beard and a bandanna, was a plainer dresser. But his “short, derisive bark” of a laugh, his Roman nose, and most of all his life with sharks, were just the same. Mr Mundus, too, once made the centrepiece of a classic “Jaws” scene, harpooning a great white in 75 feet of water off a beach where children played.
Poor man’s big game
Mr Mundus cared so much about Quint because he had helped Benchley with material, taking him out in Cricket II for weeks, and because a proper “Jaws” connection—though he thought the film “the funniest and stupidest movie I’ve ever seen”—would have brought in business. His charter-fishing enterprise, run for 40 years out of Montauk in Long Island, had started the sport of baiting and running sharks. They had been considered garbage before, but he promoted them as “fun”: a poor man’s big game at $400 a time, wily, beautiful and dangerous.
He knew their ways. They would haunt any place in the open ocean, but it was impossible to hunt one specific shark: “They don’t stay in the same place, they move. They got tails.” A 50-pound rod, his usual, would “just about handle anything that comes along”. It was nonsense to think that any fish could pull a heavy boat of the Cricket II’s size either forwards or backwards, as happened in the film of “Jaws”, though you needed a lot of line, double the depth of the water, when a baited shark dived to the bottom. Each fish he caught he said he felt sorry for, even though it was his opponent, and even though he had his own handicap, a left arm withered since childhood, which ached with the effort of keeping a taut drag on a line.
His critics, and he had many, doubted that he felt much regret. For years, before environmentalism made it illegal, he ground up small whales and basking sharks to make the best bait. Sometimes he shot sharks to finish them off. His boat would come into Montauk braying with victory and strung with the corpses of huge fish. But when the sharks themselves became endangered he began to use circle hooks, which caught in the jaw and let the fish be released, rather than gut-hooks which slowly killed it. And though his haul of dead sea beasts was immense, only seven great whites fell victim to him.
He survived his life almost uninjured, pesky and abrasive, full of advice about ways of fishing that were no longer allowed. And he could count himself lucky to die at 82 of heart trouble in his bed, not, like the Quint of the book, trailed behind a shark underwater, arms out and mouth open “in mute protest”; or, like the Quint of the film, chomped in half at the trouser-line, spouting scarlet blood like a whale.
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