Shark Treasures 181 



He and a companion would row up to a Basking shark— often so close 

 that the dinghy was actually directly over the shark's huge back. Then 

 Watkins would plunge a harpoon into the shark, leap nimbly out of the 

 way of the whistling line attached to the harpoon, and let the shark 

 tow the dinghy until it tired enough to be hauled up and lashed along- 

 side a bigger boat that accompanied the dinghy. Once a shark towed 

 Watkins' dinghy for 24 hours. The shark, harpooned in Kilbrannan 

 Sound near the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, set a course due west when it 

 left the Sound, and all that stood between Watkins' 8-foot dinghy and 

 the United States of America was the open sea. When a rescue boat finally 

 found Watkins, after the shark had towed him 100 miles, he had to cast 

 off his indefatigable shark, which swam away with a 9-foot steel harpoon 

 sticking out of its back and was never seen again. Watkins said he did 

 eventually make some money on his Basking shark venture. He quit the 

 business shortly before the price of shark oil plummeted. 



P. Fitzgerald O'Connor, a British writer turned sharker, also had a 

 short-lived fling at catching Basking sharks. He said he broke even. 

 Basking sharks produced for these three men an unusual by-product: 

 books. O'Connor, Watkins, and Maxwell each wrote a book'- about his 

 adventures, and each man's experiences and observations added much 

 to the previously scanty scientific knowledge of the Basking shark. 



Today, on the small island of Achill off the western coast of County 

 Mayo, Ireland, a group of hardy fishermen are pitting the luck of the 

 Irish against the Basking shark. The great sharks— the Irish call them 

 Tm/ZJo^m— appear out of nowhere around St. Patrick's Day, but not 

 until the end of April, when the winter weather dies in Achill's Bay 

 of Keem, can the fishermen go after the muldoa?is. 



Great nets are stretched across one side of the bay, and shark after 

 shark blunders into them. Then men set out in small boats called currachs 

 to battle the sharks, stabbing them with hand harpoons, and wrestling 

 them out of the nets. As many as 30 sharks a day— most of them 25 

 to 35 feet long— are captured in the bay during the season, which ends 

 in July or August. From 60 to 70 gallons of oil are produced from the 

 average shark, but the value of oil fluctuates wildly, and the market 

 price is rarely stable. Low in vitamin content, the oil is used primarily 

 for industrial purposes, such as in some tanning processes. The liver 

 of the slaughtered sharks is usually all that is used; their carcasses are 

 dumped at sea. Attempts have been made to induce Irish farmers to use 

 pulverized shark meat in cattle feeds, but the farmers will have no 

 mtddoans, ground up or not, upsetting the dietary traditions of their 



2 Maxwell's was Harpoon at a Venture (London: Rubert Hart-Davis, 1952); 

 O'Connor's was Shark-O! (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1953), and Watkins' was 

 The Sea My Hunting Ground (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1958). 



