1/22

A stormy Friday morning made for a slow start to the 91st Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, but the big fish started to come in by day’s end – including a bull shark that wasn’t far shy of the state record.

The firing of a cannon marked the start of action at 5 a.m. Friday. A rodeo staffer said the rodeo site on Dauphin Island had promptly been socked with three hours of heavy rain after that. At 1 p.m. the site was still scattered with puddles, even inside the sponsor tent.

Not everybody waited for the storms to pass. Charter captain Frank Harwell said he had hit the water early with his son and one of his son’s buddies. It paid off with a cart full of snapper and mackerel, but they didn’t necessarily come easy.

“Anybody tells you it wasn’t bad out there, they’re lying,” Harwell said as he hopped off his boat Friday afternoon at the weigh station. “Normally they bite hard during a storm. But there was no escaping what we were in.”

He wasn’t really complaining, though. He shrugged it off as “typical rodeo weather.”

“We always have a typhoon one day of the rodeo,” he said. “Maybe this was it for this year.”

Traffic at the docks might have been light through midafternoon, but there were enough fish coming in by land and by sea that rodeo staff in the weigh station never had to wait long for the next angler to arrive. From there, a lot of fish went to a corps of researchers from the University of South Alabama and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

Sean Powers, chair of USA’s Marine Sciences Department and a senior marine scientist at the Sea Lab, said that while the action hadn’t been particularly heavy so far, he’d been pleased to see dozens of flounder being brought in. To him, that was an early indication that the species was on the rebound thanks to new regulations put in place a few years ago.

Nor was he the only senior scientist on hand to see what revelations the 2024 rodeo might bring. Shark expert Marcus Drymon, a professor at Mississippi State University, was on the dock ready to greet any sharks brought in.

One of the biggest happenings at the 2023 rodeo was the arrival of a tiger shark that weighed in at over 1,000 pounds, setting a new state record. Drymon said that while there was some social-media criticism around the animal’s death, it was a scientific bonanza.

“It’s all about perspective,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount we learn.”

That particular shark had turned out to be a pregnant female carrying 42 pups, each about 18 inches long, he said. That and the shark’s sheer size were encouraging, he said.

“That’s all information we take to the stock assessment,” he said. “It’s information you can’t get without a tournament like this.”

“It’s satisfying because it shows the federal management plan is working,” Drymon said. “The U.S. government has done a really good job protecting sharks.”

Drymon, like Powers, is a rodeo judge. Both praised the Mobile Jaycees, who put on the tournament, for their willingness to partner up with researchers.

Drymon said, “There were no fishery statistics in the 1930s.” Rodeo records from the ADSFR and other events, gleaned from old newspaper reports, showed that the sizes of sharks caught in the Gulf peaked in the late 1980s, followed by a crash. That told scientists something was going on “at a Gulf-wide level.” The problem was overharvesting via commercial longline fishing, Drymon said, and regulations were put in place to restrict it.

The population has had 20 to 30 years to rebound, he said, and last year’s record-setting tiger shark suggests the sharks have been making progress. He speculated that if that holds true, rodeo spectators may see more big sharks this year and in the future.

A few hours later, as big fish started to come in, a near-record bull shark lent some weight to Drymon’s theory. The crane emplaced near the docks hadn’t been used for most of the day, but it finally was fired up late in the afternoon for a 107.5-pound swordfish and a 120.7-pound yellowfin tuna.

Shortly before 6 p.m., word began to spread that a big bull shark was coming in. It turned out to weigh 432 pounds, just a little short of the 448-pound, 4-ounce state record.

Remarkably, it was brought in by a team consisting of Derek Rogers, his father David Rogers and Brett Rutledge. All three were on the five-man team that brought in last year’s record tiger shark. (Rutledge is credited with that record, while Derek Rogers was credited on the leaderboard with this bull.) Derek Rogers said the bull shark was brought in without any particular drama, though it was a 40-minute fight.

Drymon said he also was excited about the rodeo’s decision to add a catch-and-release option for jack crevalle for the first time. He compared them to tarpon, saying they are great sport to catch but don’t taste all that good. Since they’re probably not headed for the kitchen, catch-and-release makes a lot of sense and avoids putting unnecessary pressure on the population.

“The species is doing fine here,” he said. “But in south Florida it’s not.”

Shifting to a catch-and-release model before there’s a crisis “means we’re being proactive, not reactive,” Drymon said.

The rodeo continues through Sunday. A spokesman for the event said more than 3,600 tickets were sold and more than a half-million dollars in prizes will be awarded. The rodeo maintains a live online leaderboard.