LIKE so many of the sharks he has hauled from the Atlantic over the past five decades, Frank Mundus’s latest catch came out of the water biting and fighting. It was only a 150lb thresher shark, a minnow compared with the 3,000lb great whites he used to haul in, but he might still have lost a hand to its powerful jaw.

“It was sliding around but I managed to get my hand away from him,” said Mundus, a legendary master angler whose record-breaking shark fishing exploits helped to inspire Jaws, the Peter Benchley novel that became a Hollywood blockbuster. “Then his tail slashed me in the shoulder. I’ve got a great big black and blue mark on my chest.”

At the age of 81, Mundus was last week still patrolling the waters off Montauk, Long Island, aboard Cricket II, the old-fashioned 42ft fishing boat that once gave him the world record for the heaviest fish of any kind taken with a rod and reel - a 3,427lb great white caught in 1986.

He was long known in New York as the Monster Man - the model for Captain Quint, the snarling shark hunter memorably played in Steven Spielberg’s film by the late Robert Shaw. Yet this month he expects to land the last shark of his career.

Mundus is hanging up his hooks. In September he will be off to his retirement home in Hawaii and Cricket II is being turned into a conservation-minded shark research centre. One of the world’s great shark hunters is – somewhat belatedly – becoming a shark protector.

“You said it right. The poacher has become a gamekeeper,” he told The Sunday Times. “But you might say that a poacher who knows what he is doing is the best man to stop the poaching.”

It was in the early 1960s that Mundus first made his name when he harpooned another 3,000lb-plus great white shark in only 75ft of water off a popular bathing beach in Ama-gansett, Long Island.

He hauled the beast ashore and thousands of holidaymakers came to gawk at its blood-soaked jaw and ferocious spiked teeth.

A few years later Benchley joined several of Mundus’s shark fishing charters. Although the author later claimed that the character of Quint was a composite of several fishermen he knew, some of Mundus’s most famous exploits showed up in the book and later in the film.

“I never made a penny off Jaws,” Mundus said years later. “All I ever wanted was a thank you from Benchley and I never got it, not in more than 30 years.” Benchley died last year.

When the film of Jaws appeared to worldwide acclaim in 1975, Mundus’s shark fishing business took off. But he soon found that everyone with a rod and a boat was trying to land another great white.

“After the movie, everyone wanted to be a shark fisherman,” he said.

Mundus retired from chartering and sold Cricket II in the early 1990s, but was repeatedly lured back to New York’s Atlantic coast by documentary film-makers keen to tap into his knowledge of sharks.

He always cut a fine figure with his shark tooth necklace and belt buckle made from a harpoon tip. He used to paint his big toenails red and green, to remind him which side was starboard and port.

Yet as the popularity of shark fishing increased – and commercial fisheries targeted sharks to sell their fins to Asian markets – so the numbers in local waters diminished. It is estimated that up to 70m sharks are killed worldwide each year. Great whites have become a rarity off the New York coast.

After writing a couple of books – including an autobiography called Fifty Years a Hooker – Mundus returned to Montauk recently for one last summer of fishing, courtesy of two Florida brothers who renovated Cricket II and persuaded its old captain to become the subject of a proposed reality TV series.

For the past few weeks Mundus has been running charters for amateur fishermen, barely disguising his lack of enthusiasm for the modest catches that they find. “Oh, we’ve had blues, makos and plenty of threshers,” he said. “Right now as far as the customers are concerned there are enough sharks to keep them happy, but not enough to keep me happy.”

Opposition to shark fishing has also been mounting steadily and this summer, for the first time in 21 years, a US animal rights group backed a protest at Montauk’s annual shark fishing tournament, which offers up to $400,000 to the bagger of the biggest shark.

“This isn’t about sport,” complained John Grandy of the Humane Society of the United States. “This is recreational slaughter done for cash prizes.”

Mundus makes no apology for his days as slaughterer-in-chief, but he seems to realise that the shark hunter’s days are numbered. His former boat will cruise up and down America’s coasts promoting responsible fishing.

The man who once lured sharks by chopping up pilot whales and trailing their blubber from his boat now advocates the use of special harpoon hooks that grab a shark by the jaw instead of ripping open its guts. That way, Mundus said, the shark can be landed, weighed and then released.

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