My gift from the sea for the fourth night of Chanukkah is a meter-long swordfish bill. On my way back to the ship after a pleasant afternoon walking around the historic sector of Montevideo, I stopped on the pier to watch a fishing boat unloading its frozen catch of shark carcasses. A fisherman lounging nearby obligingly answered my questions about fish and fishing in clear Spanish. Then he called the captain of the boat to come meet me. I wouldn’t have picked the fellow out as the captain because he was toothless, skinny, and just as scruffy as all his crew. But he was friendly, and shortly went back, at the urging of my new pescadero friends, to bring me a swordfish sword. One of the sailors on my ship will help me stash it on the rope deck to dry.
The boat is a longliner that caught its load of sharks outside the 200-mile territorial waters of Brazil. It is about 100 feet long and crewed by nine sailors, two engineers, a cook, the skipper, and two fishermen who bait the thousands of hooks they soak in the sea for a day or so before reeling the line in. The fish are flash frozen after being finned, decapitated, and probably bled. The vessel traveled four days out to the fishing grounds, spent ten looking for fish, and caught a hold full in 43 days. The ship is Spanish-owned and the whole catch, including some yellowfin tunas and swordfish, plus bag after bag of shark fins, was being loaded into three shipping containers to be sent back to Spain. I wonder if the shark fins will go on to China or be sold in Europe.
When I first walked up and saw the crane lifting a string of twenty sharks by ropes in their tails, I wanted to cry. There was all the swimming beauty of the sea mutilated and frozen, being thrown like hunks of wood into trucks. But I stuffed down my feelings and played along with the macho poses of the deck hands so I could get pictures of them holding up shark fins and tails. I'll use them in my lectures to teach the guests about the shark overfishing crisis. 
Despite the tragedy of the boat's catch, I enjoyed meeting the fishermen and the chance to learn about their lives and how they fish. When I was leaving, the skipper of a different boat asked if I wasn’t a fisheries enforcer. I assured him I would make no problems for him. Short of telling the world to shut down all shark fisheries, that is. But I didn’t tell him that.
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