Shark Tournament Uncertain

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Shark Tournament Uncertain

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

A shark tournament in Destin in 2007 is not a done deal and the director of the event’s sponsor said its future is “uncertain.”

On Tuesday, South Walton businessman and conservationist M.C. Davis, representatives of the regional and national offices of the Humane Society of the United States met with members of the Destin History and Fishing Museum’s board to discuss the future of the tournament.

John Grandy, senior vice president of the Humane Society, said the meeting at the museum was aimed at preventing an adversarial relationship between the museum, which stages the tournament, and environmental groups opposed to the event, chiefly the Humane Society. “We’re prepared to go to war but we don’t want to,” Grandy said.

At the meeting, Grandy premiered a public service announcement he said would air across the state stating that global shark populations were on the decline and in need of protection and he asked for the museum’s support of the PSA. The museum board did not take any action to endorse the commercial. For about 20 minutes, Davis and company made their case that shark populations were imperiled and that Destin would be better served by an event that celebrates Destin’s heritage as a fishing community, not one that kills sharks.

Meg Nelson, Davis’ project manager at Nokuse Plantation, Davis’ 53,000-acre preserve in Walton County, said a festival celebrating biodiversity and the important role sharks play in the ecosystem would be beneficial to everyone involved. “This would be a win for the community and a win for the animals,” she said.

Grandy and Davis said they would support the creation of such an event, both financially and organizationally. But a discussion about an event of that nature was not discussed further. Various museum board members said they felt the tournament was being unfairly targeted given the relatively small number of sharks weighed in last year (11).

Helen Donaldson, museum board member and executive director of the Destin Fishing Rodeo, said she couldn’t, in good conscience, support something that she believed would hurt the Destin fishing fleet. “The fishing industry in this town is the reason this community exists. We’re a fishing community,” Donaldson told the group. “This tournament generates a lot of business for those guys. We’d be putting some families in a position they don’t need to be in if we canceled the tournament.”

The meeting lasted less than an hour and while no firm resolutions were made, the future of the tournament, for the moment, is up in the air. It was the first time that Davis, representatives of the museum and the Humane Society had met. After the meeting, museum executive director Jean Melvin said the future of the tournament was “uncertain.”

Last year’s shark tournament, held Sept. 13-17, was the first such tournament in Destin in more than a decade. The tournament had been discontinued in the 1990s as a result of increased government regulation on the shark fishery. The tournament drew crowds in the hundreds over the weekend and raised less than $10,000 for the museum.

The event generated emails and letters of protest to the museum, to Mayor Craig Barker, to City Hall and to the City Council. The tournament also drew the ire of the Humane Society and a few protesters who stood along U.S. 98 with picket signs. By tournament’s end, 11 sharks were weighed in on the docks at the Destin Fishing Fleet Marina and more than 300 released after they were caught in the Gulf.

Several days after the event, the declared winner of one of the divisions took a lie detector test to determine once and for all that she actually caught shark.

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