Get ready - the sharks are coming. And local officials are hard at work tracking them.
"It's a lot of laborious work, but it really kicks off the season for us," said Dr. Greg Skomal of the Division of Marine Fisheries.
On Wednesday, Skomal and volunteers were busy preparing receivers that track tagged great white sharks when they arrive in Massachusetts waters.
"It gives us a sense of their distribution and local movements," Skomal said.
Most of the recievers, attached to yellow buoys, will be deployed off of Cape Cod and the South Shore in the next two weeks.
For now, they receivers don't feed back real-time information.
"We're working on that technology," said Skomal. "But for now we have to go back, collect the receivers, get the data, then we recreate the movement of the sharks."
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So far this year, no sharks have been spotted off the Cape Cod coast. But a regular Cape visitor did just show up off the coast of Long Island this week.
"The pinging shark off Long Island gives us a sense that they continue to move north," Skomal said.
Skomal says he expects the first sharks off the cape in mid to late June, when water temperatures get close to 60.
