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Massive shark hooked on ice-fishing jaunt
Cold-water fish not uncommon in Saguenay fjord
CP
Published: Wednesday, February 01, 2006
A shark the size of a car has been reeled in by a woman out for a day of ice fishing.
The whopper - a Greenland shark, which isn't dangerous to humans - is so big it had to be pulled from the water with the help of a snowmobile.
Diane Guillemette knew she had a big fish on her line but she wasn't expecting a shark.
"We worked for an hour and a half to get it up to the hole in the ice," she said.
Guillemette was fishing on the weekend with her partner in the Saguenay fjord, where waters from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean meet, about 250 kilometres north of Quebec City.
"It was about 680 feet (207 metres) down, completely at the bottom," she said of the shark. "So it took 366 turns on a wheel crank to bring it to the surface."
The Greenland shark weighed 230 kilograms and was more than three metres long.
"I reeled in the line gently because the catch was very heavy."
At one point, Guillemette thought she had lost her catch but she got help enlarging the ice hole. The shark was then landed with the aid of a snowmobile.
The Greenland shark is also known as the sleeper shark and lives in polar waters all year round.
Sharks are known to make their way into the Saguenay fjord from time to time. Jean-Denis Lambert, a marine biologist with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, said three have been caught in the last 11 years.
"It's not something we see often," he said.
"It's not too dangerous because actually there's not too many of them, first of all, and it's a species that lives in deep water, cold water, open water.
"It's not a coastal species and in this case it goes up into the fjord of Saguenay because the fjord of Saguenay is very deep and the waters in the basins are very cold."
The shark is in Guillemette's back yard on the snow, awaiting pickup by a local museum that's still looking for a freezer big enough to store it.
"Usually, scientists recommend to those fishing to cut their lines when they catch a shark," she said. "It's a practice we didn't know about.
"Biologists don't encourage the catching of sharks, but they don't seem to be disappointed to have one to improve their knowledge," Guillemette said of her catch, which will be studied by experts.
The Gazette (Montreal) 2006
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