I’m 52 years old. Fishing has been an identifying part of my being for as long as I can remember. I come from a big family. We call ourselves “The Farkles.” Everyone gets a nickname. Mine is “Fishy Farkle.” My earliest memories involve crabbing with hand nets, followed by sitting on bloody rocks with sandworms catching anything with fins. The more bloody rocks, the better. The amount of blood on the breachway rocks was always an indicator of how good the fishing was or wasn’t. Artificial lures of all shapes and sizes came next. I graduated early from recreational fishing and went to sea commercial fishing at 16 years old. This was different. Hundreds of miles offshore fishing around the clock on big, rusty steel boats for weeks at a time with men trying to earn a living for their family. I commercial fished for scallops, squid, cod, tuna, swordfish, monkfish and every type of Pacific salmon. Those were the targets, but as an unintended consequence we caught everything that swam into our net or bit one of thousands of baited hooks on the long line. Over time, I caught most everything there is to catch from the ocean floor to its surface. Catches were measured in tons, the amount of blood was unfathomable and I made more money per trip than many adults were making on land. After a few years of doing this during high school and college summers followed by a few trips after college, I was done. The wonderment of it all was gone. Now, it really was just work. Hard work. There were easier options on land. I was done with fishing forever. I never wanted to see a fish or fisherman again, or so I thought. Enter fly fishing. My childhood friend, Pete, took me fly fishing for trout. I hadn’t done much trout fishing of any kind to this point. When I witnessed Pete catch a rising trout on a sulfur dry fly, I was hooked. I felt that same blood on the rocks feeling, without the blood. I was drawn to the art of it all. The location. The process. The simplicity. The rhythm. The catch. The release. I was a kid again. I needed to start over and catch and release everything on flies. I haven’t caught everything, not possible, but I’ve caught a lot. After 20 or so years, I started having the same lackluster feelings about fly fishing that I had at the end of my commercial fishing stint. The wonderment was vanishing and I felt it slipping away. I was pretty convinced I knew it all. Or all I needed to know anyway. There was nothing left to figure out. Looking back, perhaps that was a feeling that was meant to be because I had work to do raising two boys. I did very little fishing for my own enjoyment, but I did get a lot of satisfaction out of teaching my two boys and their friends how to fish. During this time I focused on work and attending to personal issues that needed to be addressed. It was the best and worst of times in many ways. Then one day I woke up and my two boys were no longer little toddlers in Spider-Man suits. They were fairly independent. They didn’t require nearly as much attention. So I had some free time, that I thought was gone forever, open up again. I was still figuring out some personal struggles, but I was making progress in the right direction. I picked up the fly rods again but things had changed. The fly fishing community had changed. There were all new people and I knew none of them. Fly fishing methods and technologies changed. Message boards were dead. Instagram was the new and only message board. I had no idea how to even use Instagram, but my kids and their friends sure did. Little by slowly I met new people. Good people and very talented fly anglers. I also started reconnecting with some of my old fly fishing buddies in new ways. I was fly fishing for albies on Martha’s Vineyard with my old friend Austin. I hooked a beautiful albie from the beach and some dude helped me land it. That dude was Kris. Well, we got to talking while waiting for more Albies to hopefully show themselves. We somehow got to talking about sharks and realized we were both fascinated with sharks and liked trying to catch them on flies. We stayed in touch over the winter talking about sharks. When the following summer came we went out sharking one day. Kris brought two guys I had never met or knew of, Nick Mayer and Joe Goodspeed. The goal was to catch blue sharks on the fly. Mako’s are always the target, but I had never seen one in my life commercial or recreational fishing. They are lone wolves of the open sea. Mysterious by nature. I had been out a few days before and was able to find a lot of blue sharks, So I was pretty confident we’d have a great day and be into the bluesharks in no time. Well 2 hours after getting offshore, not a sign of a single shark. The three of these guys were eating sandwiches and the conversations were digressing. I was scratching my head thinking, “what is going on!? Where are they?” A couple days ago I had blue sharks biting my motor and now I can’t find a single one. I never curse the Fishing Gods but I was close. I wanted to experience it with these guys so bad. I was starting to think that this was yet another hard lesson in the illusion of expectations. I start reeling in one of the teaser rods fast because I was pissed. That’s when it happened. Out of nowhere a mako shark mouth appears and smashes the balloon with the teaser on it. It then came raging at the boat. I’ll never forget it. Out of all the fish I’ve seen it was the most fascinating to me. It’s no wonder, now, why the mako shark is the nemesis in “The Old Man and the Sea.” Big black eyes looking through me, silver sides and shaped with the same precision as an f-14 fighter jet. I was in awe with this majestic creature of the open sea. We hooked two makos that day. Both makos beat us down hard. Made a joke of all our gear and combined skills. Fast forward a few years later, to today. We now have a “Shark Crew.” A small collection of guys who are equally fascinated with pelagic sharks. Every year we explore and learn a little more together. A shark outing today consists of custom rods, floating lines, barbless poppers and dry fly flies, hand made release and tagging tools, and many nuanced strategies to find, catch and release pelagic sharks. For me, it’s a feeling similar to commercial fishing. We each have our strong and week points as fisherman. Everyone brings individual value onboard and we explore and innovate through our collective skill sets. As of today all sharks fascinate me more than ever. Most especially the mako shark. I dream of them. They haunt me. More than our best shark fishing moments. More than anything, what I value most is our shark crew. It’s one thing to say teamwork and another thing to demonstrate teamwork. The last few years with these guys and what we’ve done together has been an undeniable learning experience in teamwork for me. The most important thing I’ve learned is to never stop learning. I owe that realization to all of these guys. They continue to teach me more than I can even do right now. I’m a work in progress. I also like that the sharks are not being shot in the head to get the hook back, having their fins cut off for sharkfin soup or suspended with chains around their tails at tournaments. Sharks get a bad wrap. They are no different than any other fish. Blood on the rocks isn’t an indicator I need anymore to judge if the fishing is or isn’t good. The fishing is always good with the shark crew.