Nothing illustrates how the Sea of Cortez has had its bounty decimated better than the story of the shark camps of San Francisquito Bay. Over 200,000 sharks died in the San Francisquito Bay fishery before it finally collapsed. An equal number of other fish, the by-catch that couldn't be sold immediately, were simply thrown away. The last vast shark population in the Sea of Cortez was massacred in a single decade. Perhaps the story will teach us a lesson that might save another fishery from extinction.

In 1985, San Francisquito Bay, a small bay located about 50 miles south of Bahía de Los Angeles, was shared by a single Mexican family and a small fly-in resort. The killing of over 200,000 sharks began slowly: just three small Mexican fishing boats, or pangas, using gill nets and long lines, fished from June through September, when the shark population there is at its largest. At the end of the season they sold their catch in the form of dried shark meat and fins. The next year, 1986, the locals were joined by four more boats from La Paz and added harpoons to their arsenal and the seven boat fleet sold about 8-10 tons of dried shark and manta ray meat at season's end.

The next two years the fleet, now up to 10 pangas, caught 8,000 to 10,000 sharks each season, by drifting their gill nets all night, every night. They also caught and threw away dead an equal number of other fish they didn 't want, like sailfish, skipjack and manta rays, only enough meat was saved to bait their nets. The mantas caught in the nets, if not already dead, were harpooned with long lengths of steel rebar and thrown overboard dead.

In June of 1989 a company from Mexico City imported 15 large pangas powered by big Yamaha engines, along with the filleters, salters, cooks and other workers required to set up a large slaughterhouse. Another camp with 10 boats was set up 15 miles south of San Francisquito Bay at Rancho Barrill. The "harvest" doubled to 24,000 sharks a season and, again, at least an equal number of non-target fish were thrown back dead.

Over the next three years (1990-1993) the camps grew and grew and more than 150,000 sharks were killed, 40% of which were pregnant females. But the boats had to range further and further away from the bay to maintain their catches. Harpooned dolphin and seal carcasses began washing up onto beaches 40 miles away; the fishermen had found that baiting their nets with mammal meat attracted more sharks.

By 1993 there were two shrimpers hauling fresh shark to Guaymas for processing and several trucks were running carcasses to the desert for burial. The bay, which often ran red with the blood of discarded shark carcasses and the tons of fish they didn't want, became almost uninhabitable from the smell and the millions of flies the pollution attracted.

The fishermen began noticing by the end of 1993 the sharks being caught were getting smaller and smaller, and by 1994 the boom was over, the boats were bringing in only 2 or 3 small sharks a trip. The by-catch they discarded dead far exceeded the sharks processed. The fishery was in total collapse. In 1995 the boats all arrived expecting the sharks to be there. When they realized there was nothing left, the big processors moved on to their next target and the 5 local pangas left found almost no sharks at all.

This huge breeding ground for sharks, which had survived for eons, was now gone, wiped out in just ten years. What happened is simple: the fishing outstripped the fishery's ability to replenish itself. Someone in authority should not only have noticed, but done something about it. The signs were clear and the destruction complete.

Sharks mature and reproduce slowly. Their reproductive strategy more closely resembles that of large mammals than of other fish. The fishery was losing its newborns each season, plus an estimated 40% of all the sharks caught that decade were pregnant females. These facts are an ominous sign: this fishery may never recover. And to make matters worse, hundreds of thousands of other fish were senselessly wasted in the netting process.
What is done is done. What we must do now is make sure what happened to a vibrant fishery in San Francisquito Bay isn't repeated again somewhere else. That is what Sea Watch exists to do: to warn Mexico, the United States and the world of the next great impending slaughter, so that the next disaster of this magnitude can be stopped.