Looe sharking

Of all the trips Jon had in mind for the book, the proposed shark expedition to Looe was the one that excited me – and, if I’m honest, worried me – the most. It was certainly the one that took me furthest away from my angling comfort zone of secluded pools and vibrant rivers, in to an altogether bloodier world. It also necessitated stepping on to a boat, and being thrown around the waters of the channel, some twenty-five miles from shore. That concerned me - my track record with boat fishing is less than glamorous. There was the ill-fated barracuda incident off Florida in 1981, and the channel wreck debacle of the early nineties, and both were blighted with vomiting to a degree not seen since Linda Blair’s performance in The Exorcist.

In short, I don’t do boats. They don’t like me, and I’m not overly fond of them.

So, days before my departure to Looe I stood patiently in a queue at the Swindon branch of Boots hoping that the assistant would reach for some magic beans that could guarantee a settled stomach and flat calm seas. I came away with two wrist bands that promised to exert mystical pressure on my ying and yang, and a packet of travel pills with a picture of a boat on the front. They came with a warning about possible drowsiness. My smiling assistant had also suggested that I avoid alcohol and rich food for twenty-four hours before the trip. I accepted this advice in good faith, and promised myself I would adhere to it. I really did.

Looe’s shark angling history is a long one, but its place as the home of English shark fishing dates back only to 1953, when the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain was founded there by Brigadier J. L. Caunter CBE MC. Until recently, it had met in what is now a pub called the Salutation, but the club has recently moved to its own shore-front office. Half a century ago, boats could be hired for £8, and a season’s catches often numbered in excess of 3000 fish. Holidaymakers would wait for the evening to witness the catches being weighed on the quay, but modern sensibilities dictate that specimens are measured and released. In 1958, the tally was 5,744. In the twenty-first century, there are fewer sharks, and fewer boats trying to catch them. A typical season sees two to three hundred blues caught between May and September.

I travelled by train, arriving on the little Looe Valley Line from Liskeard. This final part of the journey was serene – the last mile runs alongside the estuary, and salt air soon filled the carriage. My host in Looe was Cornish Dave and his family. Dave lives in a charming Victorian house overlooking the harbour, and directly opposite the Shark Angling Club of Great Britain’s HQ. We’d met once before, introduced by a mutual friend at a Southampton football match which had ended disastrously – Saints games often do. Perhaps to cancel out our inauspicious history, Dave marched me straight to a pub with offers of Cornish Beer. By the time we arrived at his house an hour later, we’d been in some other pubs, and I was closely acquainted with the local ale. We were both a little shame-faced when Dave’s wife Elizabeth reminded us that there was a barbeque to attend. More alcohol, and industrial quantities of rich food, followed. I imagined the Boots assistant tutting furiously, but she hadn’t reckoned on the formidable allure of West Country hospitality.

The following morning, we met our skipper at Shark HQ. Mally Toms is one of a small group of skippers who run boats out of the harbour on behalf of the SACGB, and his credentials are second to none. He told me that he’d been fishing these waters for over forty years, and it would be fair to say he has the leather-skinned no-nonsense shark hunter demeanour and ‘there be monsters out there’ patter down to a tee. Throughout our long day, he never did spit tobacco towards the horizon and utter the immortal line ‘I think we’re going to need a bigger boat’, but it felt like he might at any moment.

We left Looe harbour at 9 and a two hour journey in to the deep water 25 miles from shore followed. At anchor, the first job was to catch some mackerel, and these were as obliging as ever. There were five anglers aboard – Dave, his son Chris, a chap whose name never emerged but who Mally christened Quasimodo, and a long-time shark man named Tom, who bore the scars of more than a few battles.

Mally set up five shark rods, each with large floats and 12 foot wire traces. Tom, a veteran of this sort of thing, arranged the drawing of lots, and we were allocated a rod each. By this point, I should add, I had thrown up the morning’s scrambled eggs, and much of the previous day’s feast, but was feeling relatively good. Chris was suffering badly, Dave was bounding round the boat like he’d done it all his life. Quasi and Tom were similarly nonchalant, though the former warned me that – in spite of his years working on tugs – he was highly likely to join the ranks of the infirm. It was, Mally assured us, a simple Force 4 to 5, and we should expect action imminently.

Imminence, in shark fishing terms, can mean anything. On that day, it meant 4 hours of inactivity (if the occasional bout of mal-de-mer is conveniently forgotten). In the final hour, Dave’s rod (number five in Tom’s lottery) screamed in to action, as something peeled a hundred yards of line off the old Penn reel in seconds.

‘Shark’ shouted Mally.
‘Shiiiit!’ said I.
Chris threw up, and Dave grabbed the rod.

This was Dave’s first shark, and the next twenty minutes were a tense affair. Eventually (and I will spare you the blow-by-blow details and Hemingway-esque dramas), a blue shark of 7 feet in length had joined us in the boat.

I’d not seen a shark in a boat before, and claim no expertise, but this was one was unequivocally pissed off about being there, spitting the hook out and sabotaging our efforts to photograph it, measure it, tag it and release it.

Within a minute or two, it was spiralling back in to the depths, more or less unscathed. Dave was delighted, and the collective spirit on the boat was joyous. Just seeing one of these remarkable creatures is special, and the identity of the captor almost irrelevant.

At least, that’s what four of us told ourselves. Dave just grinned.

The journey back was quicker, a little over an hour-and-a-half, and we arrived in Looe with the shark flag flying. I’d turned from green to pink, and even Chris had regained his usual pallor. A large cigar was lit, and the wrist bands discarded. My ying and yang had let me down miserably, and the predicted drowsiness had been a chore, but the joy of seeing Dave’s big blue, and the knowledge that its capture necessitated the consumption more Cornish Beer that night was ample compensation.