Shark Fishing at French Frigate Shoals
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2025-08-06
Shark Fishing at French Frigate Shoals
by Ken Homer
Trigger warning: this story contains a depiction of animal cruelty. If you are bothered by that, you may want to stop reading now and skip the images below. Before I tell the tale, I need to set the stage with a little backstory…
Among the more unusual experiences I’ve had in my life was the year I spent on a coral atoll called French Frigate Shoals (FFS). So named because the French navigator Jean François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse had two frigates run aground on the shoals in the late 1700s. Located roughly halfway between Honolulu and Kure Island, (the westernmost island in the Hawaiian island chain), French Frigate Shoals was by far the most isolated and one of the most starkly beautiful places I’ve ever been.
In 1974 I read an article in my local newspaper – The Bath-Brunswick Times Record – about some Navy men who were stationed on FFS during WWII. For some reason I had the most peculiar feeling that I was destined to visit this lonely place. At the time joining the military was the last thing on my mind and I could not for the life of me figure out why I felt connected to this place on the other side of the world from me. But two years later I joined the US Coast Guard and a year after that, upon completing my training as an electronics technician, I discovered that there was a berth open for FFS so, I took it.
On April 1st, 1977, I boarded a Hercules C-130, a massive turboprop plane, at Barber’s Point Air Station and departed for my year’s duty rotation. FFS was rather notorious in USCG at the time. Because it was so isolated, it was often where officers who were at the bottom of their class were sent along with enlisted men who tended to toward under achieverhood. Most, but not all, of the men sent there viewed it as a punishment. The joke was: What’s the worst they can do? Send me to French Frigate Shoals? Personally, I thought that a tour in Port Clarence, Alaska would have been much worse since the cold and snow meant staying inside for eight to nine months of the year.
With a complement of 18 men, two dogs, and over 30,000 birds, the other joke was that there was a woman behind every tree. There were three sparsely-leafed trees on the island and no women to be found anywhere – unless you count mermaids, which I had heard tales of but never spotted during my tenure there.
The day I flew out was the day that a newspaper in Honolulu had decided to run a story on the Coasties who were living on “The Rock.” McDonalds donated a bunch of burgers, Big Macs, fries, and shakes, and three beautiful Hawaiian teenage girls who worked the counter came along for the ride and a photo op. Someone actually did have these girls pose behind the trees and they took pix of them, but I never saw the article and don’t have access to those photos.
Technically, the location of the LORAN station at the time was on Tern Island, the largest and most permanent of the half-dozen islands (many of them seasonal) that make up The Shoals. Visualize an ancient volcano, nearly all of it underwater, with just a few islands sticking up along the rim which has been undergoing a slow erosion by the tides and waves over the millennia until what was left were tiny dots of land protruding out of the vast ocean.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy decided that they needed a base for refueling and the Seabees came out and bulldozed up the coral of Tern Island, transforming what had been a 600’ crescent-shaped island into the shape of an aircraft carrier. They built a corrugated iron seawall around it and enlarged the island to be over 3,000 feet long and some 400 feet wide. It was about six feet above sea level and the bulk of the island is a landing strip. At that time, no thought was given to the impacts that kind of construction would have on a fragile marine ecosystem.
After the war, the Navy abandoned Tern Island, and the Coast Guard, which had operated a LORAN-A station on East Island, a much smaller island on the rim, moved their operations to Tern Island. After a cyclone flooded the place, a new barracks and a new signal-power building were built in 1972. When I arrived five years later, the accommodations were still pretty new. Today, the place is a shambles.
Tern Island sits on the rim of long dormant volcano with its airstrip in a near perfect east/west orientation. Tides and currents mean the ends of the main beach on the south side of the island shift with the seasons. There is also a seasonal beach on the east end of the island. The north and west sides of the island were open water as the Navy had dredged a channel along them. Seven miles due south was the saving grace of my visual field: Lapérouse Pinnacle. The ancient core of the volcano rose up some 130 feet above the water line and gave us a place to fix our eyes that broke up the other 359º of water view. There was something magical about being able to fix my eye on this tower of guano-covered rock.
A few hundred yards beyond Tern Island’s seawall were the breakers. Every now and then we’d have windless days, and this allowed for the most unusual experience of feeling like we were in the middle of a lake rather than in the middle of the ocean as the water around us sometimes became as smooth as glass. Honestly, it was a bit disconcerting to see such a vast stretch of water so placid. Having witnessed storms on the island, I knew the awesome power that lay beneath that becalmed surface.
It was on one such calm summer day that the University of Hawaii sent its shark research team out to The Shoals for some shark fishing. They were there for three days. On one of those days, I was able to join them. The water was too shallow to allow the 80’ long vessel to moor at the island. So, two other guys from the station and I took the Boston Whaler® out to meet her. It was early morning when we departed from the shore, and the water was as still as I’d ever seen it. I was perched in the bow. Flying fish were startled by our approach and launched themselves out of the water in front of us sailing a good thirty or forty yards before sinking back below the surface. As if by magic, a pod of seven dolphins suddenly appeared and danced across our bow, easily speeding past us. It felt like a good omen and a laugh erupted from me as I watched their graceful acrobatics. If you’ve ever seen dolphins swimming in the open ocean you know how infectious the joy of these playful creatures is.
We reached the U of H ship, and in the time-honored tradition of sailors, we requested permission to come aboard. Permission granted, we quickly climbed up two ladders and settled ourselves on the upper deck about 15’ above the waterline where we’d be able to observe the action without being the crew’s way.
The vessel was constructed of aluminum which gave her a peculiar shudder when we got clear of the volcano’s rim and out into open water where we hit the swells. The rig they used to catch the sharks consisted of a steel cable 1” in diameter attached to a 3,000-pound mushroom anchor resting on the sea floor connected to a series of floating buoys that ran the better part of a kilometer. The same configuration anchored it at the other end. Interspersed along the way were steel leaders about 15’ long attached to large hooks baited with shark meat – sharks are happy to eat other sharks. The ship’s winch was used to pull up the leaders which we soon discovered had successfully caught several huge sharks including Great Whites and Tiger Sharks.
I was surprised when they pulled the first one out of the water. It was a Great White and it measured about 20’ from nose to tail. This was a gigantic being! The winch groaned under the effort and the ship heeled sharply under the weight. Blood streamed into the water from the wound in the shark’s mouth and a dozen sharks swam along our starboard side, clearly excited by the blood in the water. I was able to get a good pic of a free-swimming tiger shark that we estimated to be about 14 or 15’ long.
They hauled the shark aboard and laid it on the deck. The Captain took a .45 and fired several bullets in a neat cluster where he estimated the shark’s brain to be. At the time, I didn’t think much about the suffering of the animal, but I do recall that an hour later the poor thing was still breathing. Finally, when it was clearly dead, the crew slit its belly open to inventory the stomach contents. I don’t recall everything that it had eaten but there were at least two Leatherback turtles, a Hawaiian Monk Seal pup, some seabirds, and a lot of fish. Unlike in Jaws, there was no license plate. Later, the Captain cut out the teeth. I’ve not kept up with the science, but back then, they studied shark teeth in the hope of discovering hints about the age of the animal.
I was the smallest guy onboard, and the Captain called me over, opened the jaws and showed me that they easily fit over my head and shoulders. I shivered as I realized that I could have swum into its mouth! It was a moment I’ve never forgotten.
Looking back now, 48 years later, the memory of the day is as vivid as ever, I can almost taste the salt air. It was among the most exciting adventures I have ever had. However, when I think of those poor sharks slowly dying in the sun on the blood-soaked deck so that “researchers” could learn more about them, it strikes me as a cruel and senseless end for such magnificent beings. It makes me sad now to have witnessed the killing of eight sharks whose only crime was being a predator that scares the shit of the most fearsome predator of all: man!
Ken Homer • August 2025
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