Frank Mundus, the hulking Long Island shark fisherman who was widely considered the inspiration for Captain Quint, the steely-eyed, grimly obsessed shark hunter in Jaws, died on Sept. 10 in Honolulu. He was 82.
The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Jeanette, said.
Known as the "Monster Man" for the size of the sharks he caught, Mundus forged his reputation as a fearless fisherman in Montauk, Long Island, hunting down the world's biggest sharks.
"I had a lot of close calls," he once said. "Probably too many close calls."
Mundus and his wife moved to the Big Island of Hawaii in 1991, but often returned to Long Island in the summer, when tourists and city-slicker enthusiasts sought to spice vacations with a shark hunt, priced at $1,800 (U.S.) for a party of five.
On just such a venture in August 2007, the tail of a 3-metre thresher shark splashing off the stern of his 12-metre boat, the Cricket II, slapped Mundus and sent him reeling. He struck right back, planting his gaff – a giant fish hook on a pole – in the shark's back and hauling it aboard.
Mundus had run charter boats from the docks of Montauk since 1951. But one night in the 1950s, according to one of his accounts, sharks outnumbered bluefish and in the ensuing struggle a shark was snared. The next day, Mundus posted a sign by his boat: "Monster Fishing."
Mundus had an outsized personality and looked the part with his diamond-studded gold earring, a jewel-handled dagger with a shark-tooth blade, and the big toe of one foot painted green and the other red, for port and starboard.
His most fateful encounter with a shark came one day in 1964, when Mundus already had two sharks hanging on the side of his boat and a third on the hook. Then he spotted a huge one alongside.
"I harpooned him and he took off for the horizon," he told The Daily News in 1977. "Before I got him, I harpooned him five times. A white shark. A killer. He was 17 1/2 feet long and weighed at least 4,500 pounds. The biggest ever caught."
The legend grew, and in the next few years, he repeatedly took Peter Benchley, who wrote the best seller Jaws, out to sea.
In 1975, Jaws was turned into Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie, which for years left millions of beachgoers toe-deep in the sand. Robert Shaw played Quint, who exits by sliding feet first into the belly of a monster great white.
Benchley, who died in 2006, denied that Mundus had been the inspiration for Quint, whom he described as a composite character.
Clearly irked, Mundus said: "If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn't get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in."
In 1986, Mundus dragged in a 5-metre long, 1,554 kilogram great white – not by harpoon, but by rod and reel, quite a feat for a man with a withered left arm – the result of a bone-marrow infection.
Although Mundus caught hundreds of sharks during his career, he became something of a conservationist in later years. He promoted the use of circle hooks, which catch in the jaw, not the gut, increasing a shark's chances of survival if it escapes or is released. He also helped start a shark-tagging program and backed catch-and-release fishing.
With files from Associated Press
