‘Got him Dad’ as Louise lands rare fish
EVER since he was a teenager fisherman John Francis Brosnan has been associated with the priceless story of an incredibly rare, massively valuable sturgeon that was caught 51 years ago by a Dingle trawler and by an incredible stroke of good fortune – from the fish’s point of view – managed to escape. But John Francis isn’t the only one in his family with a fishy tale to tell.
The story of ‘ The Dingle Sturgeon’, which was recently broadcast in a wonderful RTE Radio 1 documentary, told how the Morning Star arrived at Dingle pier with the sturgeon, which had already been promised by President Eamon De Valera to the Poor Clare Nuns in Kenmare. John Francis was helping out on the deck of the boat and when the large crowd that gathered to see the rare fish called to him to ‘ throw it out’ so that they could have a closer look he got confused and, in one of life’s great disasters, threw the precious fish overboard rather than up on the pier. The fish was still alive and, to this day, John Francis remembers seeing its fin breaking the water as it swam straight for the harbour’s mouth and freedom.
If that fleeting glimpse was the last John Francis ever saw or heard of a sturgeon it would have been too soon. That is, until his daughter, Louise, rang from Canada to say: “I got him, Dad”.
Louise lives in Calgary where she works as a nurse and last autumn she was on a fishing trip when, by the rarest of coincidences, she caught a sturgeon. Given the place that sturgeon command in Brosnan family lore, she had no problem recognising the fish and John Francis has the pictures of a delighted Louise holding her catch to prove this was no fishy tale.
But what happened Louis’s sturgeon. Did she eat it, or did she follow family tradition and let it go again? John Francis pauses before answering: “Do you know what, I never thought of asking her that.”