Thieves? Maybe, and We Need More Like Them

Jupiter, Florida, dive boat skipper John R. Moore (56)and his mate, Tanner J. Mansell (29), face up tofive years in prison and fines up to $250,000 after aWest Palm Beach, FL, jury in December convicted themof stealing commercial fishing gear in federal waters.

In August 2020, they pulled up a longline with 19 hooked lemon sharks and released them because, they claimed, they thought the line was illegal and wanted to save the sharks. They had six passengers aboard to dive with sharks and were headed to their second dive. (See Undercurrent October 2022 for an earlier story.)

During the hearings, the plaintiffs claimed that although Moore, a formal commercial fisherman, saw the line was connected to a large orange buoy marked with the vessel's name, he told his passengers that it was an illegal abandoned "ghost set" and duped the passengers into helping retrieve it. After releasing the sharks, the defendants stowed more than three miles of monofilament line, weights, gagnions, and the marker buoy on their boat.

[But Undercurrent has a question. If they were up to no good, one would have to ask why would they allow the entire "crime" to be documented by their divers, who took videos and still photos for more than three hours?]

From his boat, Moore called state enforcement officers and said he'd found an illegal shark fishing longline with entangled lemon sharks and cut them free. He didn't mention the marker buoy. The state officer told Moore to cease his activities pending an investigation.

When Moore returned to Jupiter, an officer stopped the boat, noting that the gear retrieved appeared brand-new, with fresh bait on the hooks Moore was advised to leave the gear on the dock, but he removed hooks, attachments, and weights and allowed others to take the rest of the hardware connected to the line.

The gear was valued at $1,300, and the lost sharks at several thousand dollars The judge has yet to rule whether the defendants will be required to pay restitu-tion or, for that matter, serve any sentence or pay any fine.

From Undercurrent's point of view, though we didn't attend the trial, we guess that Moore and Mansell genuinely didn't like to see sharks die hanging from a long line and would rather have them swim free so the divers could see them They freed the sharks and car-ried the gear back to dump it rather than to let it float forever.

OK, so it's technically theft, but we prefer to see it as environmental action, and since illegal, it's probably more accurate to label Moore and Mansell as "eco-warriors," just what we may need more of if we're to save the sharks.

John Bantin and Ben Davision

After we were ready to go to press, Moore and Mansell received one year of probation.