A 70-year old Swiss pensioner has brought ashore what he believes to be the largest ever fish caught by a rod and line in Irish and British waters off the County Clare coast, it has been reported.
Joe Waldis yesterday described his own feat as "the fight of my life" after landing a sixgill shark weighing almost half a tonne. More accustomed to fishing for pollock, Mr Waldis described the 12ft 9in shark to the Irish Independent as "a monster". Mr Waldis said that for 35 minutes he had been struggling with the shark, which first got hooked on his line with mackerel bait 60m below in a stretch of sea north of Loop Head on Tuesday afternoon.
Owner of the Clare Dragoon charter boat, Luke Aston, of the Carrigaholt Sea Angling Centre, told the Irish Times: "It's unbelievable. We knew that Joe had hooked on to something big and we strapped him in and the fight was on." The shark was too big to haul up into the boat and it was towed by the Clare Dragoon into Carrigaholt. It then had to be transported by forklift to a local quarry to be weighed on the quarry's weigh bridge. It came in at 480 kilos or 1,056 lbs -- the biggest ever fish caught by a rod and line in the British Isles.
Monsters of the deep: Six-gill sharks
* Six-gill sharks are a deep-water species, typically inhabiting depths of more than 300ft, and they have been recorded more than 6,000ft down.
* The sharks are found all over the world, from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to Australia and Alaska, and have a diverse range of prey, from molluscs and crustaceans to salmon, hake and even seals.
* They are only rarely caught, and that is usually at night when they tend to come nearer the surface.
* The females grow bigger than males and can reach as much as 5.5m (18ft) long.
TOP PIC: Joe Waldis with 12ft 9in shark. Photograph: Luke Aston
Joe Waldis is not the first man to hook a shark off the Clare coast as the below picture (courtesy of abegoien) proves. This blue shark was captured in the Shannon Estuary in 2008. For more sea angling stories visit the Shannon Regional Fisheries Board website.
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