Meet Ocean City’s Shark Whisperer

“We had a hammerhead shark on the rod and we’re fighting it, and it’s toward the end of the day and I’m thinking once we get him in, we’re going home,” recalls Capt. Mark Sampson, who has run a charter fishing service out of Ocean City for four decades, of a particularly memorable 2020 boat trip. “And then I look across water on the other side of the boat, and I see this dark shadow and it’s trucking. I said, ‘Hey guys, I think we got a mako coming in.’ It kept coming and coming and I was like, ‘Man, it looks really big.’ Suddenly, I realize it’s no mako. It is a huge shark.”

A shark so big, in fact, that Sampson and the crew scurried to pull in the boat’s fishing lines and chum—the tuna carcasses hanging over the side.

“It’s a great white and we don’t want to accidentally hook it. We’d never get it onboard.”

Naturally, just as the tuna is getting hoisted from the water, the great white—at 15 feet, still one of two biggest Sampson has seen in his nearly half-century career—opened its massive jaws and attempted to take a chomp. The great white’s teeth grazed the tuna, and in the iPhone video that later went viral, it also appeared interested in taking a chunk out of the vessel.

“It did give us this wonderful photo op,” Sampson continues with a chuckle. “Whites can get curious around a boat, more than other sharks, and it circled us a few times. In the video, you can hear one of our crew saying, ‘Don’t take a bite out of the boat. Don’t take a bite out of the boat.’ It swam so close to the bow, it allowed us to reach over and stick it with a tag.”

A U.S. Coast Guard licensed captain and fishing guide since 1986, Sampson is also an instructor, marine animal rescue volunteer, outdoors writer, author (Modern Sharking), and longtime participant in NOAA’s Cooperative Shark Tagging Program, which utilizes citizen scientists to track the highly migratory and, in some cases, endangered species.

For several years, he also worked with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources on a hook study—with the idea, ultimately successful, of identifying safer hooks for catching and releasing sharks.

Growing up in Northern Virginia, Sampson caught the fishing bug during summers at his parents’ place in Ocean City and began working at local marinas in high school. Not surprisingly, he chose to attend nearby Salisbury University.

By coincidence, he was working on a charter boat between his sophomore and junior years at Salisbury when a fellow crew member told him about a new, bestselling novel called Jaws, which Sampson, already fascinated by the large sea creatures, immediately bought and devoured.

The next year—exactly 50 summers ago—he saw the blockbuster movie when it hit O.C.’s big screens.

“I still remember the eerie, weird feeling when I walked out on the dock that night afterwards,” he says while bringing back a recent Ocean City charter outing on his boat, Fish Finder. “Not fear exactly, but the water suddenly seemed much more mysterious and sinister.”

While the book and movie launched the careers of Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg, it also launched a national shark obsession and sport fishing frenzy, which led to the decimation of shark populations. Both the author and director have since expressed regret about their misleading portrayals of sharks—they don’t target human beings, for example.

Benchley eventually became involved in shark conservation efforts,
telling the Los Angeles Times, “Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today.”

Sampson also admits regrets about his participation in the trophy hunting culture of the ’70s and early ’80s. He notes sharks have existed for 400 million years, surviving mass extinctions, and we are their biggest threat—not the other way around. And they remain overfished
for their dorsal fins. (Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese delicacy.)

Like Bentley, his focus in recent decades has been on conservation and sustainable fishing, including his advocacy of catch-and-release best practices.

Like most fishing tales, many of Sampson’s memorable experiences revolve around the ones that got away. As if it happened yesterday, he recalls fishing out from Ocean City in the 1980s with a friend, Dick Arnold, who’d hooked what they estimated was a 350-pound mako shark on a light 16-pound test line.

At the time, it would’ve been a world record. Arnold fought the fish for 11 hours—no one else could touch the rod—as Sampson manuevered the boat, chasing after the elusive mako. Then the line finally broke.

“People always ask what was the longest you ever fought a fish and that was it,” Sampson says. “And I remember when the line broke. Of course, I thought Dick was going be disappointed, cussing and swearing, and blaming this or that, and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I’m just glad it’s over.’”