CLIVE GAMMON
If you should decide, after a fortnight or so perhaps, that there are other pleasures to be sought in the Channel Islands apart from drinking and smoking duty-free, and throw- ing flowers at girls, you might conceivably go fishing. Along the shallow, rocky shores you might use red cat and white cat as bait —let out of the bag, these are merely local names for marine worms that live in the sand—and try to catch a rare (for British waters) red mullet or an even greater rarity, a golden grey mullet, the kind with a gilt spot on its cheek. You have a thin, but better than normal, chance here because the British record for the first species came from Guern- sey and for the second from Alderney.
Ordinary mullet, the plain grey kind, are much more plentiful. In the Channel Isles they catch. them after first exciting their appetites with a mixture of pounded shrimps called shirvy.
Or again you might run into a bogue. box or oxeye, a wild yellow-striped fish that has an even wilder Latin name. !lox hoops. The only Box hoops, as far as I know, that was ever caught in the United Kingdom came from Jersey. And last year. also in Jersey, somebody caught a file fish. I've never even seen a file fish.
For serious angling, though, in spite of their interesting geographical position, the Channel Islands were not until recently con- sidered to be of much account, although as long ago as 1960 an enormous porbeagle shark of 367 lbs was caught but disallowed as a record on a technicality: at one stage in the fight the line was handled. And then the summer before last a Jersey man, Denis Bourgourd, went out after tope. a small, species of shark averaging 30' lbs, and instead came home with a 430 lb porbeagle which now stands as the British record, a record that is unlikely to be beaten for a very long time indeed.
Porbeagles are not everyone's idea of a sinuous, menacing terror of the deep, but apart from mako shark, a handful of which are caught each summer. they are the biggest sharks we have. They are portly, comfort- able-looking fish. 'The flesh.' says one ang- ling book, 'is podgy.' They are not spectacu- lar fighters, either. A strong run or two and then they settle down to circle the boat, so that landing them depends very largely on the strength of the angler and his tackle and on the skill with which the skipper man- oeuvres the boat to prevent the line fouling on keel or rudder. But you cannot get away from the fact that they are big.
Their comings and goings are still a little mysterious, and angling attention was rudely diverted when Bourgourd's whopper turned up off Jersey. for in spite of the 1960 fish, all eyes at the time were concentrated on the seas around the Isle of Wight where, briefly. the record had been broken in 1968. The theory then was that big sharks followed ocean-going ships from deep water, breaking off at the approaches to Southampton water.
This now seems unlikely. Porbeagles seem to have a liking for comparatively shallow inshore waters, especially where there are plentiful reefs. and these are the conditions which the seas around Jersey amnly However, the Channel Islands at present lack the number of shark-fishing charter craft that are found in Cornwall and the Isle of Wight. Oddly, the more boats that are operating the more success there is likely to be with shark, for each boat puts out a trail of fish fragments. called 'rubbv-dubby', to attract them. And the more trails there are, the better.
Given a greater availability of boats, it could easily happen that mako sharks. as well as porbeagle. might be discovered off the ChannelIsles. These. although they bear a superficial resemblance to porbeagles. are a far tougher proposition. the only shark widely recognised as a true big game fish. Makos leap wildly when hooked. It is not a matter for doubt that they will attack the fishing craft either by leaping into it or. as has been known in Cornwall. tearing planks from the hull. A little more demanding than a Battle of Flowers, perhaps, but even more satisfying to some.
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