SEA FISHING 

 years ago of the exciting sport he had when harpooning these immense 

 basking sharks in Irish waters, and, so far as I recollect, though 

 formidable enough when wounded, they were never in the least aggressive 

 at other times. 



The blue shark and porbeagle are regular summer visitors to Corn- 

 wall, and I have caught both many times when fishing for pollack on 

 the outer grounds off Fowey and Mevagissey. The blue shark is sufficiently 

 described by its name, and has the pointed snout and crescent -shaped 

 mouth, with two or more rows of small, sharp teeth, on the under side of 

 its head. The porbeagle, which is dark brown in colour, is of heavier build, 

 and lacks the sinuous grace of the other. Nor has it the troublesome habit 

 of gyrating in the water when hooked, so as to wind the line all about 

 its body, which makes the blue shark so difficult to dispatch. We never 

 fished for either of these sharks of set purpose, in the days when I was 

 a regular visitor to Mevagissey, but only when they interrupted our sport 

 with better game, though the late Matthias Dunn, an old inhabitant of 

 that village, and a man better informed than his neighbours on all matters 

 connected with fish and fishing, often said to me that, if it could only be 

 made better known, shark fishing in Cornwall would soon become very 

 popular, words to which the recent vogue of tope -fishing at the other end 

 of the Channel has since lent peculiar significance. There were hot, still 

 days on which, without any apparent cause, the pollack would suddenly 

 stop biting, and the odds were that if we threw out two or three pilchards, 

 the back fins of a shark would soon be seen circling slowly round the boat. 

 Then we would take in all lines and throw out a heavy one, with a single 

 large hook baited with a whole pilchard, the shank of the hook being 

 long enough to occupy the shark's teeth. As a rule, the shark soon took 

 the bait, and had then to be played to the gaff. A blue shark would be 

 hauled inside the boat, clubbed, and taken off the hook, care being taken 

 that it did not remove all the skin off an unwary arm with its skin, which 

 is as coarse as sand-paper. The porbeagle, on the other hand, was treated 

 with more distant respect and killed outside the boat, when it would be 

 either cut adrift or slung over the bow to take ashore. The reason for this 

 different treatment lay in the fact that we knew the dreadful odour of its 

 blood, which is so tenacious that it cannot be got out of the boat for days. 

 In addition to these two sharks, the thresher, or mackerel -shark, was 

 generally seen on hot August days, flinging itself in the air and falling 

 back on the dense shoals of mackerel or pilchards, on which it next 



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