You join me on the deck of the good ship Island Maid as we sail on the late
afternoon tide bound for the treacherous waters of Newquay bay.
Nobody knows quite what to expect as we leave the safety of the harbour,
because a hidden menace might be lurking beneath the rolling waves. Never
mind Moby-Dick. Forget The Old Man and the Sea. This is the story of how I
hunted for the Great White Shark of the Southwest and lived to tell the
tale.
This very same shark has been terrorising the coast of Devon and Cornwall for
the past week. Some say it’s got a mate. Some bathers claim they have fled
the sea in terror at its approach. A few claim to have photographic evidence
of the monster’s fin scything through these waters. Others believe, well,
let’s just say they are far from convinced that it exists at all.
“Look,” said the lady at the tourist information centre with a heavy sigh.
“There is no great white shark. I’m a member of the sailing club so I should
know.”
Remember, though, that this is Newquay, the surf capital of the UK. This is a
town so self-consciously cool and laid back that it boasts a hairdresser’s
shop called Dudes. Young men here skateboard openly down the middle of the
street. It is not at all embarrassing to be seen in public in a wetsuit.
So if an entire school of great whites loomed over the horizon, it would be
Newquay’s natural instinct to avoid a fuss. Certainly our skipper, Colin
Robins, doesn’t seem concerned that at any moment — der dum, der dum — his
boat might be bitten in two.
He’s more worried about the sea conditions. “I should warn everybody that it’s
a bit choppy out there today,” he said. There are two dads and their
assorted families in our makeshift crew of 10 and one of the youngsters is
already looking pale.
We are rolling and pitching on the open water now, not that far from where a
great white has supposedly been sighted. So I scan the waves with my
binoculars. With the boat rocking from side to side, this is not as easy as
it looks in the films.
There is certainly something out there in the water, though. Is it a seagull
or a fin? Before I can really be sure I trip over a bucket. Whoever says
shark hunting isn’t dangerous doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“If anybody had seen a great white we’d have heard about it before now,” said
the skipper patiently. “We’re a very close-knit community.” He has been
taking boats out on these waters for nearly 40 years.
“We’ve seen dolphin, basking sharks and sea fish, but never a great white.
Last year the basking sharks were very common, about a mile off the coast.
They come every July and August.”
But then a thought strikes him: “Actually, we’ve not seen any this year. And
it’s funny: we usually get loads of starfish but we’ve not seen them this
year either.”
Something must be keeping them away. Something like a great white shark,
perhaps? Certainly all this talk of sharks has excited the crew. “What
happens if we catch a shark?” pipes up a teenage boy.
“You’ll have to haul him in yourself,” says the skipper.
The boy looks worried — and not long afterwards there is a hefty tug on his
line. It’s a whopper and puts up quite a fight. Fearlessly, though, he hauls
it aboard to discover not so much a shark as a mackerel with a weight
problem.
It's tempting when you see a mackerel flapping harmlessly on a line to dismiss
stories of sharks prowling our shores. But the great white is rapidly
becoming as much a part of the Cornish summer as clotted cream and sunburn.
A Radio Cornwall listener called to say that she remembers a great white in
Penzance 60 years ago. Or if not a great white then “a very big one”. More
recent sightings were reported in 1999 and 2004.
The latest outbreak of Jaws mania started 20 miles west of Newquay when
holidaymaker Nick Fletcher trained his video camera on a school of dolphins
swimming 200 yards off a beach at St Ives.
“It was really lovely,” he said, “as dolphins are so graceful. Then this
shark, with what seems a huge mouth, crashes down and disappears. It’s
incredible.”
Experts examined the video and concluded that the intruder was either a
dolphin or a harmless basking shark.
More a porbeagle than a rottweiler of the seas. They also dismissed a second
video. But the smell of shark was in the water now and other spotters were
soon circling.
Suddenly attention switched to Newquay, up the coast, where the local paper
pictured a ferocious-looking creature on its front page under the headline:
“Great white spotted in resort waters”.
According to the Newquay Guardian, angler Kevin Keeble had taken the picture
during a fishing trip in mid-July. “We were about a mile off Towan Head and
I saw this fin in the distance,” he said.
“The shark was only there for a few seconds before it disappeared. I’ve been
fishing off Newquay for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The photograph was duly authenticated as a great white by the National Marine
Aquarium in Plymouth and other experts said there was no reason why a great
white shark should not take its summer holidays off Cornwall. The waters are
pleasant and the dining — usually on seals — can be five star.
Then the trail went murky. Keeble, a nightclub doorman, claims he took the
picture while fishing for mackerel aboard a ship called the Benita Ann. But
according to the Newquay harbour master, the Benita Ann is now in Scotland
and has not been seen in the area for 15 years.
No wonder opinion at the harbour side turned sceptical about the photograph.
“I think it’s a Loch Ness monster,” said a lady selling trips around the
bay.
Not everybody in the area was amused. There were fears that the prospect of
becoming a shark’s takeaway would deter visitors. The summer season is vital
to the town’s economy: it has a population of 20,000 during the winter
months, but more like 100,000 in the summer.
“My mum phoned and told me not to go swimming,” a Newquay woman told me. Was
it time to clear the beaches and summon Steven Spielberg?
In fact, shark fever proved to be such good news for the resort that you might
think the tourist board had sent a scuba diver into the bay with a fin
strapped to his back. After a dreadful, rain-swept start to the summer
season, suddenly everybody was talking about Cornwall. The streets of
Newquay were packed last week.
Surfers in their wetsuits were still paddling out to sea. Young men were still
trying to impress young women by leaping off the harbour wall. Down at St
Ives, boatmen were doing a brisk trade taking visitors out to see where the
great white shark might have been. People gazed at the water and jaws gaped
— though not the ones they hoped for.
A St Ives baker produced special shark-shaped pasties and a man was
photographed with a plate of fish and chips: “Man eating shark” read the
caption. The Sun newspaper’s big red bus rolled into town, with Page Three
girls on hand to give out shark T-shirts and beach balls. Someone was doing
a roaring trade by offering the theme tune from Jaws as a mobile ring-tone.
Yesterday The Sun reported another sighting. Andy Braund and his wife Rachel
had seen and photographed a large fin slicing the sea surface. “We’ve been
coming to Cornwall on holiday for years,” said Braund, “and we’ve seen
plenty of basking sharks. This definitely was not one of them. It was
definitely Jaws.” He should know: he’s a policeman from Bridgwater.
Not to be outdone, neighbouring Devon hit back with its own sightings.
Jeanette Anderson, a windsurfer, told how she came face to face with a great
white 30ft from the shore at Slapton last year. “I’m a member of the Marine
Conservation Society and I know my sharks,” she said. “I’ll never surf
in that spot again.”
Anderson is not alone in her certainty. Tony Powell from Newbury, in
Berkshire, is convinced that he saw a great white three or four years ago
off Padstow.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “I was looking at seagulls when a shark
came out of the sea with its mouth wide open, facing me.”
Officially a great white has never been confirmed in British waters. Such
sightings are treated as UFOs — unidentified floating objects. They are very
rare animals, said Doug Herdson from the National Marine Aquarium: “There is
a very small breeding population of great whites in the Mediterranean, but
there have been no recorded incidents in the past 20 years.” Not even a
nibble.
Only five have been caught north of Spain in the past 200 years and the last
was a juvenile which was netted 30 years ago.
Back on the Island Maid, we are chugging back to port. As we approach the
harbour, a grey shape does indeed loom up from the water and swims along
beside. Another grey shape joins it. And another on the other side. Soon we
are pretty much surrounded.
They aren’t sharks, of course. These are seals, or what a great white would
probably call “lunch”. When the ships come back to port, the seals know that
visitors will toss fish over the side.
The great shark has given me the slip. I even put on a wetsuit to go in search
of nature’s perfect killing machine, but in the end my largest haul was a
mullet from the local fishmonger.
Perhaps it’s no bad thing that the great white, if there ever was one, gave us
all the slip. As Paul Benney, area lifeguard manager for the Royal National
Lifeboat Institution, concluded: “It’s a big ocean — who knows what’s out
there. But if there were predators in the sea, someone would have been taken
by now.” How reassuring.
Be careful out there, big beasts stalk this land
Never mind great white sharks in coastal waters, what about the big cats
prowling inland? There are regular reports of unidentified beasts not
normally thought to live wild in these islands. They include:
The big cat of Beckingham Palace
Earlier this summer a strange animal savaged Charlotte Church, a lamb
belonging to Gordon Ramsay, the chef. The lamb, named after the Welsh
singer, was being raised on the Hertfordshire estate owned by David and
Victoria Beckham. A vet suggested that it had been killed by “a big cat”;
locals said a “puma-like” animal was on the loose.
The beast of Balbirnie
Since 2005 there have been several sightings of a large cat on the Balbirnie
estate, near Glenrothes, Fife. When police investigated they found a paw
print and took a plaster cast. Experts have identified it as the print of a
young big cat — possibly a black leopard.
The Sydenham panther
In March 2005 Tony Holder, a former soldier, saw his pet cat cornered by
another animal in the bushes at the bottom of his garden in Sydenham, south
London. He went to the rescue only to be pounced on by an animal about 4ft
long. “It sent me sprawling on my back in the bushes. Its huge teeth and the
whites of its eyes were inches from my face,” he said. “I was fighting for
my life. I was grappling with it for a good two minutes before it ran off.”
Holder was left with a large scratch on his face, a bitten finger and a cut
wrist.
The beasts of Bodmin, Exmoor, Dartmoor etc
People have reported numerous sightings of large unidentified creatures in
these locations. Paw prints have been found and even a skull, although their
precise origins have never been established. One skull said to have come
from a big cat was later found to have been part of an old leopard-skin rug.
Martin Whitley, a falconer, is the most recent person to have photographed a
strange black animal on Dartmoor. He said he was “more or less certain” that
it was a big cat. However, local resident Lucinda Reid claimed that the
animal was her Newfoundland dog Troy, whom she often takes up on the moor.
“He’s 12 stone and comes up to my hip,” she said. “A lot of people don’t have
a clue what he is because he’s so big and black.”
Whitley said: “I’m very familiar with dogs and have worked with them all my
life. I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t a dog I saw.”
there was a white shark that had a good picture taking of him about 10 years ago and i havent heard if anyone caught it. so possibility is that it could be the white shark that was seen in devon 10 years ago.
kim, sandhurst, england