Two shark divers freed 19 sharks from a longline. They're facing five years in prison
Two years ago, a captain and mate of a Jupiter-based shark diving boat stopped about two miles into their trip taking six tourists out to swim with the apex predators.
During the August 2020 charter, they came across a commercial fishing longline — a controversial piece of angling gear consisting of sometimes up to several miles of monofilament line, weights and hooks, designed with the purpose of snagging dozens of fish at a time.
The men, boat captain John R. Moore Jr., 56, and mate Tanner Mansell, 29, gathered up the three miles of line and freed 19 sharks and a Goliath grouper, a state-protected species. The three-hour effort was done with the help of their charter passengers, telling them the line was an abandoned “ghost set” of line, U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecutors said.
Two years later, a grand jury indicted Moore and Mansell of theft of commercial fishing gear in federal waters. A jury convicted the men last week, and they now face five years each in federal prison. The line, prosecutors said, belonged to a commercial fishing operator that was licensed to catch all the species of shark that were hooked that day.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-shark-divers-freed-19-002120575.html
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