PORT HOOD: Liam Spears, along with his dad Robbie and uncle Garth, were treated to a rare sight when pulling their herring nets from the waters beyond Henry Island on the morning of Sept. 17.
In addition to their regular catch, the three men had an unexpected visitor. A 10-foot long shark was looking up at them. Liam said the fish wasn’t really caught in the netting; it was more like it was laying in the net, almost resting. All of this happened at 7 a.m.
“I was keeping my hands out of the water, that was for sure,” he said.“I grabbed the gaff because we had to get him out of there. I got him by the head and pulled him out.
“He didn’t have a lot of life in him, so we held him against the side of the boat, and he eventually started swimming a little bit. He came back to life.
“Once he started moving, there was no holding onto him.”
Liam not only handled the gaff, but he managed to handle his cellphone at the same time. He was able to snap a photo of the encounter, and the image was soon the talk of the town on Facebook.
Seeing such a large fish so close to shore, he said, was a first for him.
“Sometimes you get the small blue dog sharks around,” he said. “People who are tuna fishing sometimes see them around their boats. I’ve heard of people getting them farther out, but I never saw one this close.”
The following day (Sept. 18) Liam noted a second shark sighting took place. This one related to a tuna boat out of Murphy’s Pond, the wharf in Port Hood. The fishermen took a tuna to shore, but not before a shark got hold of him.
“The tuna had a chunk taken out of him in 60 feet of water,” Liam said. “This is a busy time of the year for them, with herring and seals and everything else.”
In an effort to get a little extra context on shark sightings, The Reporter reached out to one of the province’s experts on all things aquatic, Fred Whoriskey. Whoriskey is the Executive Director of the Ocean Tracking Network at Dalhousie University’s Department of Biology.
He said Liam’s photo provided a good bit of information.
“This is a porbeagle shark,” he said. “It’s relatively common in Canadian waters. It’s a northern shark, and a member of a group of sharks like the mako and white shark.
“It can regulate its body temperature to some degree. It takes the metabolic heat generated by muscles — we sweat to get rid of that heat — but here this animal has a current exchange system to move that heat to the core of its body, to keep its core warm. When it’s warm like that, its muscles work really well.
“It’s a formidable predator capable of doing things under cold temperatures.”
Whoriskey said porbeagle sharks are great swimmers with bodies like a torpedos. He added their mouths are designed so that they don’t give up a meal very easily.
“The teeth are built to capture fish; they’re like nails. They spear and hold fish as opposed to some of the other sharks that have serrated teeth designed to tear.”
Reporting shark sightings to Fisheries and Oceans Canada is a good idea, he said, as the authorities like to keep track of animal species. Fisheries and Oceans Canada runs a Shark Research Lab at the Bedford institute of Oceanography, and that facility would love to hear any interesting fish stories — especially if photos are included.
“We’re getting anecdotal reports of white sharks,” he said. “We’re also seeing juvenile and adult sharks popping up in places we haven’t seen them for years. That’s typically a sign of a budding population, but it’s hard to quantify numerically because people haven’t been keeping track of this on an ongoing basis.”