John Moore

There's a big anti-shark culture in Florida, you know, in the fishing community.

You know, because a lot of the fishing community hates the sharks because, you know, the sharks eat their catch.

And so a lot of the fishermen, you know, want the sharks dead.

And we regularly see gunshot wounds to sharks.

That's just a standard in our business.

We're out there diving with these sharks and you see sharks on the daily with bullet holes in their head and stuff.

And so...

As soon as the fishing community found out that this was a legal line that was killing sharks out there, and that we had thwarted this, we became like public enemy number one, and they were like, I was getting death threats.

The whole thing just seemed so insane.

If we were going to commit a crime out there, I wouldn't be calling the police while I was doing it.

I wouldn't be calling Fish and Wildlife repeatedly on myself.

And the passengers we had, this chief of police, his wife, who also worked in law enforcement, as witnesses to this, because they were listening to my phone conversations on speaker.

They were seeing me reporting this in real time.

There was no way that you could have thought that we were doing anything illegal out there.

It was always in the back of my head, but I honestly, you know, I never thought anything would come of this.

You know, you couldn't forget about it because still, like...

Almost on a daily, there were people like waving pistols at me when I'd go out of the harbor, you know, fishermen waving guns at me and, you know, yelling obscenities at my passengers and stuff.

Like the level of, you know, vitriol from the fishing community was insane.

They quickly said, John, you are not cut out for this.

They're like, it's so easy to make you say, oh, yeah, no, I see your point.