We transferred our captive open-ocean (AKA pelagic) stingray (minus his stinger that we pulled off to prevent injury) to the USC Marine Institute on Catalina Island today, and then remained in the area to fish. It was kind of slow, but our final set brought us a very nice-sized male mako shark. He was 5 feet 6 inches (171 centimeters) long, from the tip of his nose to the fork in his tail.

When I say "set", I'm referring to our fishing method. How do we fish? Here's how Carl Safina described it in his blog a few days ago:

"The fishing method is a “short” longline: two miles of cable with 200 hooks. (Commercial longliners often use 25 miles of line, sometimes twice that.) The hooks are J-shaped, steel, with 2-inch shanks and a 1-inch gap.

We start making our first set just after 6 a.m. The cable is stored on a big drum about four feet in diameter.The end is run overboard through pulleys and tied to a big buoy with a flag. The boat moves slowly forward, pulling the line out. Hooks and leaders have to be attached as the line goes out. The hooks are kept racked along the rims of large plastic garbage pails, about 100 to a pail. The pails hold the leaders, about 12 feet long. At the end of each leader is a large stainless snap that grips the longline.

Two people pick out hooks and hand them to two other people who bait them. The bait is dead mackerel, and the hook goes in the mouth, out the gills, and then into the body. The baited hooks get handed to the person designated as “clipper.” Every fifty feet the longline is marked, and at that mark a leader gets clipped on. Every five hooks, a brightly colored buoy gets clipped on.

My job is buoy boy, and to qualify you have to count to five. In practice this is much more difficult than it sounds. Suddenly the most important question in my life is, “Was that the fourth hook, or the fifth?” At any rate, our wake is soon marked by a line of bright, bobbing buoys, looking festive."

We tagged the shark with a SPOT and PAT tag. Here are a couple of pictures taken by Jason Larese. The first shows the shark as we were dragging him into the tagging cradle. In the second photo, Carl and I are applying the SPOT tag to the mako's dorsal fin.

The SPOT tag sends a radio signal to satellites whenever the fin breaks the surface, which happens a lot more than we ever guessed it would. The satellites are able to triangulate a position from the radio signal and ultimately, the locations are sent back to us so we can follow his movements. The PAT tag -- a Pop-up Archival Tag -- will automatically release from the shark eight months from today. It'll pop to the surface, and, for two weeks, until its little battery finally gives out, it will send samples of its data to a satellite.

We ended our evening fishing for Humboldt squid, this time successfully catching two which we collected for our colleagues in Santa Cruz who are studying their feeding behavior. We're hoping for another successful day tomorrow! -- ABOARD R/V DAVID STARR JORDAN, near Catalina Island, California.