CANADA: Record Mako Shark Caught !!

When it hit, Jamie Doucette knew it was big. He was used to big, mind
you, being a man who'd spent two decades on the Nova Scotia coast as a
lobster fisherman, and being a regular entrant in the annual Yarmouth Shark
Scramble, in which he once landed a nine-footer.

But this one, this one was different.

It's the first week in June and Doucette is standing on the dock in
Wedgeport, a charming fishing village just south of Yarmouth, where his
dad's lobster boat, Soldier Boy II, is back in the water after a good
scrubbing, ready to head out for a summer of longline fishing for haddock,
halibut and dog fish.

Doucette and his father fish for lobster from Shelburne to Digby,
their traps scattered on the ocean floor as far out as the 50-mile limit,
and it's out there you'll find them, father and son, every year from the
last Monday in November until the end of May.

Doucette is 33, the poster boy for a new generation of Nova Scotia
fishermen, from the pierced ears and tongue to the female pirate tattooed on
his inner arm, from the tanned bald head and the neatly trimmed moustache
and beard to the designer shades and the impressive biceps.

Under a hot sun, dressed in T-shirt, jeans and gumboots, he is
recalling the day he caught the big fish, a short fin mako shark so enormous
it is still one of the largest ever caught on the planet.

It was August 2004, and he and a group of friends had taken a break
from work and were in the annual Scramble, enjoying a few beer on the back
of his father-in-law's lobster boat.

You might be surprised to hear there are mako sharks in Nova Scotia,
but Doucette will tell you they are a regular visitor to Maritime waters,
chasing mackerel with the Gulf Stream into the Bay of Fundy.

So there he was, fishing in the derby with a rod and reel, using a
200-pound test line and a hook baited with mackerel, chumming 48 miles out
of Yarmouth.

"We were sitting in lawn chairs and having a couple of beer. We had a
couple of hours to spare before we had to head back to the wharf.

"We had party balloons set out as bobbers on six rods, and as soon as
we heard one of the lines zinging out, we reeled in the other lines and
waited."

It was Doucette's line, and he worked it for 30 minutes before he saw
the fin, rising a good foot out of the water about 150 yards out.

His first thought? Great white. His second? Big.

Doucette was in a harness hooked to the rod, but there was no
captain's chair bolting him down.

"If it decided to take off to Hong Kong, you're going with it."

After 15 more minutes of fight, the shark headed straight for the boat
and, like a scene right out of Jaws, went under it.

"We're running around the boat so the line doesn't chafe, everyone's
going crazy, running out of the way, and I had to keep handing off the rod.
It went under the boat twice."

It was only then, an hour after he hooked it, that Doucette saw the
mako. "It came up under the bow and rolled, belly up, and all I saw was
white and I thought 'this sucker's big.' "

He handed off the rod and put on leather gloves just as the shark came
around the stern, which on a lobster boat is open and about three feet off
the water.

Doucette's friends started to get the ropes ready, intending to lasso
the shark's tail, but couldn't because the fish was so big that the tail was
out of reach.

Finally, one of them got a noose around its head but it chewed through
it, thrashing and snapping its giant jaws at Doucette's feet. It bit through
several more ropes until the crew finally secured it with three thicker
ropes, wrapped around its huge head and lashed to a cleat. One of the crew
eventually killed the shark by cutting its throat with an eight-inch knife;
it bled out within minutes.

Doucette admits feeling a pang of guilt, hoping it wasn't a pregnant
female, but knowing, too, that he had landed a great trophy.

It was so big that when they tried to haul it on to the boat using the
boom and a portable hydraulic winch, the boom began to bend, forcing the men
to abandon the winch and pull it on to the deck manually, using ropes.

With the shark finally secured, they headed back to shore, and
Doucette phoned his mom and some friends and said: "You gotta come see this
shark. It's huge."

"I thought it was maybe 400, 500 pounds, maybe 600. We couldn't get
our arms around it."

They pulled up to the registry wharf in Yarmouth and as "soon as we
hauled up the tarp and the boys saw the fin, everybody's jaw just dropped."

When they finally got it on the official scale, lifted into place by a
forklift to keep the scale from tipping, the shark weighed in, to the
growing crowd's delight, at an astonishing 1,082 pounds.

So big was this shark -- a Canadian record and one of the largest ever
caught, its liver alone weighed 208 pounds -- that Doucette not only became
a local celebrity, but the shark itself became an urban legend, with the
Internet reporting that it was a great white and had been caught everywhere
from Galveston, Tex. to Vancouver Island's Barkley Sound.

Doucette's fish was a female, measuring 10 feet, 11 inches and about
25 years old, according to scientists attending the derby, who said it had
likely been mating and was probably fatigued at the time it was hooked.

The mako's meat was sold to raise funds for local children's
charities, and Doucette had a taxidermist friend mount the massive jaw. He
took home about $3,500 in cash and prizes, along with the bragging rights
that he carries today, which include a photo in Maxim magazine.

He missed the Shark Scramble last year, busy working and raising his
young son, but says he will be there this August because he is, by nature
and nurture, a fisherman and because he has a title to defend.

"I love it. It's in me."

sfralic@png.canwest.com

To see photographs of Jamie Doucette's record mako shark, log on to:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/yarmouth.asp

date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:40:55 -0400 author: Maple Tree