In praise of British sharks

Fin fascination: blue shark around bait tube off Cornwall Film director Simone Spear Basking shark Snorkeller's-eye view of blue shark Richard fills the chum tube Snorkeller in cage off Cornwall waiting for blue sharks Tope Small-spotted catshark DVD cover

Shark research expeditions usually entail chumming to attract sharks, which means hours of idle time spent watching the water. Four years ago, while bobbing around in the Adriatic on a research boat, my wife Jacqui and I were struggling to stay awake during the night shift. We were discussing the irony of charging around all over the world looking for sharks when there are 30 known species in British waters, many of which are present off our native Cornwall.

This 3am conversation was the catalyst for the whole ‘Sharks in British Seas’ project. Our intention was to increase the awareness of the sharks found in our waters, and by doing so highlight their threatened status. Most of all, we wanted to challenge and change the hysterical and unbalanced coverage given to sharks by the media.

We started by cage diving with blue sharks off Cornwall, before we launched a series of British shark research expeditions. I wrote Sharks in British Seas, the first book on British sharks to be published for many years, and we decided to use the book as the basis for a film. I teamed up with videographer Simon Spear, with whom I had made the short film Porbeagles in Peril, which was well received. There seemed to be two options – approach a broadcaster and probably be told to make a film involving teeth and gory attacks, or do it ourselves and make the film we wanted to make. We took a deep breath, reviewed our credit cards, prostrated ourselves before our wives and started making our film.

Last summer’s shocking weather taught us how lucky we had been in previous years. As the bad weather continued, we began to doubt whether we would finish the film. To get footage of all of our sharks would clearly be impossible with the time and resources available, so we concentrated on the ones we thought would prove the easiest to film: blues, basking sharks, threshers, angel sharks, hound sharks, dogfish, catsharks and soupfin sharks (also known as tope). This was an ambitious shortlist and proved too ambitious for putting to sea during the non-event that was summer 2008, material from 2006–07 came to the rescue.

As any UK diver will know, finding sharks in British waters is no mean feat. This is partly down to the pelagic movements of some of the sharks, the depths at which they live and, of course, the perennial problem of British visibility (assuming you’re able to get out to sea in the first place). Of course, basking sharks can be found close to shore in the summer, but this was far from a classic year for sightings in Cornwall. Blue sharks – famous as the classic shark of Californian waters, but also found in the Atlantic – are even more of a challenge, as they live a long way out and avoid vessels unless there is bait in the water.

Porbeagles represented another challenge, as even in baited water they proved skittish and disappeared when approached. Still, the porbeagle was important to our project because it is such a spectacular animal, and because its vulnerability to fishermen sums up many of the issues shark conservationists are dealing with right now. To film our porbeagles, we used a variety of techniques involving chumming, teaming up with anglers, and sheer luck.

Working on or near the surface, we needed decent light and reasonable sea states. Last summer, we got rain, overcast skies and lumpy water. Thankfully, as I mentioned earlier the previous two summers had been better, so we already had footage in the can.

Britain has a little-known but impressive diversity of sharks. Smooth hammerheads are infrequent visitors, shortfin makos come here more frequently, and blues turn up as soon as the temperature goes above 14°C. Our search for porbeagles and basking sharks took us to the far north of Scotland (Dunnet Head, where the world’s largest porbeagle, at 230kg, was caught in 1993) and Cornwall. Our hunt for thresher sharks took us to the Isle of Wight, while the North Sea off Bridlington was the scene for our efforts to film tope sharks. We sought small-spotted catsharks in west Wales and spurdogs in a Highland sea loch.

British sharks are not always easy to find, and they certainly didn’t want to meet us, but they’re out there, and we came across most of them. We have a variety of marine environments in British seas, which is why we have such a variety of shark species.

Researching the book and then the film threw up lots of interesting titbits, including some accounts of utterly bizarre accidents that somehow became classified as shark attacks. In fact, there have even been fatalities officially attributed to sharks in UK waters. I also found four cases of people needing hospital treatment after being attacked on land.

In one case, Darren Smith, a Newquay chef, was delivering a porbeagle to a restaurant. It was on ice in the back of his van, but when he was forced to brake hard, it shot forward onto his shoulder. He tried to push it back, missed the nose, and its mouth shut with his hand in it – the cuts needed 17 stitches.

In Kent, a landlady ended up in hospital after the shark on the wall behind the bar dropped off and hit her on the head. In December 2000, a Worcester chef who was feeding prawns to baby blacktip reef sharks in his restaurant aquarium got bitten on his hand – six stitches were required. And in April 1995, a family received medical treatment after inhaling fumes from a dead shark that had been removed from preservative fluids and left at their home.

Phil Hambridge had to be evacuated by helicopter from his boat off South Wales after a blue shark he was de-hooking at the mouth end gave an energetic tail flick, sending another hook into his temple. Last summer, off north Devon, Anthony Perkins was airlifted to hospital after being been bitten by a blue shark that he was in the process of releasing.

Amazingly, several deaths have been attributed to the harmless basking shark, although it could hardly be held responsible for the events that unfolded in 1937 off Port Righ on the Kintyre peninsula. A basker breached under a 5m dinghy, capsizing it and causing three of the five onboard to drown. But perhaps the most improbable shark-related deaths occurred off Cornwall in 1956 when a shark, probably another basker, blew up a Royal Navy vessel.

A shark had reportedly been harassing a small boat and divers on the surface, so Lieutenant Commander Joseph Brooks and a Navy colleague made two explosive charges to straddle the shark and threw them at it. It was a good shot: the line got caught around the dorsal fin with the charges hanging down either side. The boat turned away, but the shark – whose only sin was being a tad curious – swam back to the vessel and both charges exploded under the boat, blowing it to bits and killing two of its occupants.

These dark snippets from the history books apparently show that the safest place to be to avoid shark attacks in Britain is in the water – I discovered no cases of anyone being seriously injured in a ‘real’ attack in the sea. But be warned: being on board a boat is risky, the most dangerous place to be is on land – and for heaven’s sake, don’t give a shark dynamite…

Sharks in British Seas, by Richard Peirce and Simon Spear, was published in February 2009 (priced £19.99). Available from http://www.Amazon.co.uk, the Shark Trust (http://www.sharktrust.org), Elasmo Films (http://elasmofilms.com ), the Shark Conservation Scoiety (http://www.sharkconsoc.com ) and other selected retailers.