A drone is not a fishing rod, and in two New Jersey beach towns that distinction now carries a police notice.
Bay Head announced on Aug. 17 that drone-assisted fishing is not permitted within the borough. Mantoloking posted the same message a day later. Neither town passed an ordinance. Both are enforcing NJSA 2C:40-28(d), a state statute that has been sitting on the books.
"New Jersey law prohibits knowingly operating or using an unmanned aircraft system to take or assist in the taking of wildlife," the Bay Head Police Department wrote.
Bill Gagne, who heads the Bay Head Improvement Association, said the law simply had not been on anyone's radar.
"It's not something that's a new statute, a new law; it's simply a law that they weren't quite aware of at the time and now they're going to enforce it," Gagne said.
What put it on the radar was a bull shark landed on a Bay Head beach in broad daylight in mid-July by lifeguards, who photographed and released it. Three weeks later a 12-foot tiger shark came ashore at Island Beach State Park around noon, on a section closed to swimming.
"The chumming is just unconscionable to me," Curtis said. "It's luring predators close to shore, and they can't stop them."
The anglers reject the premise. A.J. Rodondella, who runs the Middletown-based guide service Apex Predators, told the Asbury Park Press that no one is putting large volumes of bait in the water, and that what is dropped goes several hundred yards out at night, hours before any swimmer arrives. Chumming, in the technical sense, means a sustained stream of chopped fish creating a scent trail. A baited hook is a different thing.
Gagne argues the nocturnal schedule is beside the point.
"If a shark determines that there is a food source in this area, they're not going to go away just at 9:30 in the morning because we happen to start having people going and swimming in the ocean," he said.
Scott Thomas, of Grumpy's Tackle in Seaside Park, supplied the numbers that explain why this became an argument at all. Shore-based shark fishing has surged over the last three years alongside a growing shark population, and his surfcasting customers are landing three to seven sharks a night this summer. Drones are ferrying baited hooks 200 to 300 metres offshore. Most fish are brown, sandbar or sand tiger sharks, with spinner, tiger and bull sharks turning up occasionally.
None of it is illegal in itself. Fishing for sharks from the beach is permitted in New Jersey and across most of the US coast, and the fish are released. There have been no shark attacks at the Jersey Shore this year, and the International Shark Attack File lists 15 in the state since the 1800s.
