Shark Men

- Season 3

(2012)

The expedition gets off to a rough start thanks to a new method of landing the sharks with a sling (instead of a lift), along with the fact that they now have to implant acoustic tags under the sharks' skin--which should make it easier to track their movements.

After anchoring at Socorro, one of the four islands that make up the Revillagigedos archipelago, the Shark Men catch their first male of the expedition--a 6½-foot silky shark.

The Shark Men don't take failure lightly, so when they're overwhelmed by--and fail to hook--two tiger sharks, their determination kicks in and they figure out a better method.

After a long stretch of nothing but frustration, the team is finally seeing consistent success--mostly due to the realization that the technique used to catch great whites works perfectly on tiger sharks.

At the Revillagigedo Islands off Mexico's western coast, the tally for tagged sharks is rising but so are tensions among the men.

The men are tired, tense and determined to succeed but the window is fast closing. One more tiger shark and 3 more silvertips are desperately sought before they need to pull anchor and leave the region.

The Shark Men push into a new and danger-filled corner of Cocos Island in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, an area at the center of the shark finning industry.

The Shark Men race against time to tag as many sharks as possible in one of the most notorious shark finning regions in the world.

Though the team finally adds hammerheads to their list of tagged shark species, there's little celebration aboard the mother ship. The relentless pace of work is wearing some of the men down and tensions flare within both the science and angling teams.

Hammered