JAWS OF WHITBY
Yorkshire trio reel in a 9ft monster – but it’s not even their biggest catch!
EYES rolling, and baring its terrifying teeth like a scene from 70s blockbuster Jaws, it emerged like a beast from the deep after a 40-minute battle.
There was no question the 9ft monster was a shark – but it wasn’t the kind of whopper usually reeled in off the Yorkshire coast.
Steve Watson, 68, his son Andrew, 33, and friend Matt Ward had set off from Whitby, North Yorkshire, last weekend on what looked like a hopelessly optimistic mission to catch a big shark. But they were 15 miles out to sea when after seven hours of waiting they finally got a bite.
Steve, a retired design engineer from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, said the trio have caught about ‘20 or 30’ sharks over the past four years. And this frightening looking specimen – believed to be a porbeagle shark – was not even the biggest. Only last month they caught a shark off the Cornish coast believed to weigh around 35st.
But finding these big fish much further North is a tougher task. Mr Watson said: ‘It’s quite difficult to find sharks in the North Sea, that’s why we set out on a quest to do it. We are probably the only boat going out of Whitby trying to catch shark.’
Mr Watson said Mr Ward was holding the rod when the latest shark was hooked early in the afternoon. When it was eventually reeled in Mr Watson was manoeuvring the boat and one of the other men put his hands within 18 inches of the huge jaws to pull on the line and free the hook to release it.
Thankfully, despite resembling a man-eating Great White, porbeagles are said to pose no threat to swimmers off the east coast of the UK this summer.
But on Tuesday, The Mail reported how fisherman Max Berryman, 21, had to be airlifted to hospital after being bitten on the leg by another porbeagle as it thrashed around on the deck of his trawler off Land’s End.