Jaws: The Saga Continues, or Concours' Believe It Or Not!

Just when you think you know someone, you find out he used to run a shark-hunting business—and he lost his hand BEFORE he ever hunted his first shark, and now he works for Concours!

That man is our own Michael Scaffidi. He’s taught me that if you ask the right questions of someone, you’ll discover the hidden stories that you would never expect to hear. When we asked our employees to answer some bio questions to be posted on the new Concours website, http://www.concoursmotors.com/, Michael mentioned in a quick blurb that the only time he wasn’t in Milwaukee was during his brief stint in the Florida keys running a shark-hunting business in the 70s! Fortunately, he was willing to take some time to tell me the story, and he’s allowing me to share it on our blog!

Back in his early days, Michael was pretty big into sports and had been off to spring training in LaCrosse, WI. When he returned, his dad got him a job working at Continental Can, just down the road from where Concours is now. Continental Can made beer cans, and Michael worked the line. On his 3rd day on the job, a large piece of sheet metal crashed on top of him, leaving scars and cutting off his hand! I almost didn’t believe him—Michael has two hands and they’re both real, but he explained that it took 2 years and 7 operations to reattach his hand.

Not surprisingly, Michael was in a bit of a funk afterward. He found it difficult to go back to school, and he couldn’t be involved in sports. So he and some friends took a 3-week vacation down to the Florida Keys, setting up in a campground. They went fishing, and ended up catching sharks!

He returned home and tried to go back to college, but 3 weeks vacation wasn’t enough to help. So with $97, a backpack, a sleeping bag, and a tent, Michael hitchhiked back down to the Florida Keys. He got a job cleaning a bar floor, saved up some money, and in 2 months’ time, bought a pick-up truck and a boat and started his shark-hunting business.

He would shark-hunt on his own, but he would also take clients out. He would meet them in the bars in the evenings, and ask if they wanted to have one of the best experiences of their lives. Then he’d take them out fishing and hunting the next day.

Michael would catch up to 500-lb sharks—hammerheads, nurse sharks, and bull sharks, and this business was actually quite profitable. He would sell the meat for $0.20/lb to local crab and lobster fishermen to use as bait in their businesses, and he would get the jaws clean and sell them to tourists for $50-75 bucks as he walked through the local campgrounds.

Catching sharks is quite an ordeal, as he explained. There’s no simple rod and reel involved. Instead, a cable that is around 100 feet long is stretched across the ocean floor and anchored on each side either by a coral reef or 6 cinder blocks. Steel chains with hooks are attached along the cable itself. Someone would have to dive down, unclip the line, and let it come to the surface so it could be baited. Then that person would dive down again and reattach it. You set it up in the morning, go fishing for fish, then return at the end of the day to see if you’ve caught any sharks.

If you have, someone must dive down and unclip the cable. At this point, the shark has been unable to swim for a long time and has become lethargic, so the danger isn’t as great. But Michael says as the cable rises, you’ll see a large black cloud coming up from under the surface and you start “freaking out!”

Once the shark is caught, it’s pulled onto the boat. Michael’s boat was 17 feet long, and many sharks would be lying with their heads and tails hanging off either edge! The boat could also be 4 inches from sinking due to the weight of the shark, the people, and the equipment!

With such excitement and all the profit, what would make Michael give up his business? A real-life scene out of Jaws, that’s what…

On what turned out to be his last fishing day, only he and a friend had gone out on the boat to hunt. Michael swam down to unclip the cable and see if they had caught anything. The water that day was particularly murky, and it was difficult to find the cable. They figured it was due to the current.

When Michael surfaced, he was a significant distance from the boat and the buoy that should have marked the cable on a better day. He looked up to see his friend standing up in the boat, waving frantically for Michael to swim back. It turns out that the water was murky because there was a 15-20 foot hammerhead caught on the line, still swimming, dragging the cinder blocks around behind it! And now, it was coming for Michael.

He swam as fast as he could toward the boat, but when he got there, he was too exhausted to pull himself in, and his friend couldn’t risk losing sight of the shark. So Michael just hung there and waited.

Well, you know how it ends because obviously Michael is alive to tell the story today! His friend got the shark, and Michael said that was it! He returned to working at the bar for a little bit, and finally he came home to Milwaukee, and now he’s part of the team at Concours—a rather calm living compared to shark hunting. Apparently, we’ll have to wait and see if there will ever be a sequel…