Two years ago, a captain and mate of a Jupiter-based shark diving boat stopped about two miles into their trip taking six tourists out to swim with the apex predators.

During the August 2020 charter, they came across a commercial fishing longline — a controversial piece of angling gear consisting of sometimes up to several miles of monofilament line, weights and hooks, designed with the purpose of snagging dozens of fish at a time.

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The men, boat captain John R. Moore Jr., 56, and mate Tanner Mansell, 29, gathered up the three miles of line and freed 19 sharks and a Goliath grouper, a state-protected species. The three-hour effort was done with the help of their charter passengers, telling them the line was an abandoned “ghost set” of line, U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecutors said.

Read more: Miami Herald