Game Fish Diaries - Chic McSherry

When fishing for tarpon off Galveston, it’s impossible not to catch sharks. The reason is that you use large, free-lined, shad for bait, which is as good a shark snack as any. The technique is simple; you look for one of the many shrimp boats that trawl up and down the area, you get into the wash behind it, sling the baits out and wait for a strike whilst drifting along in the wake. After about half an hour or so if you haven’t hooked up, you go find another shrimper.

Tarpon, jacks, sharks, kingfish and dolphins all follow the shrimpers, hoovering up the bait fish stirred up by the activity. Simple food-chain mechanics. Like Bill said, it is world class fishing but it don’t look too pretty.

That aside though, I much preferred this to being anchored up - and we did catch fish. Before I came away on the trip, I had told my kids that I would be fishing for tarpon and sharks. They ignored the tarpon bit (the bit I was interested most in) and went straight to the “Wow – are they BIG sharks?” followed by the usual 20 questions: how will I catch them, what will happen if they jump in the boat: are their teeth VERY big: what if one bit me on my leg: how much BLOOD would there be: would I have to kill it or would I be able to go to hospital with it still on my leg... The whole juvenile interrogation process. You know the drill.

I’d never caught a tarpon and I really wanted too. Bill told me that they run up to and even over 200lbs in the Galveston bay area and that definitely qualifies it as a world class tarpon fishery. On the other hand, I’d never caught a shark either and to be honest I didn’t really want to. I guess I am maybe a bit snobbish about this; shark fishing has just never appealed to me and I don’t really like sharks. What can I say?

But I allowed that I was actually fishing for tarpon anyway and if, by any chance, I did happen to hook a shark, well I was merely doing my bit for the kids. It helps you through the day to get the ethics and the ground rules straight at the outset.

Anyway, the first shrimper produced a couple of bites but no hook-ups. It was called the Lady Jennifer and Jennifer being my ex-wife’s name it seemed appropriate that we go find another boat. Superstition is a powerful thing at sea. Bill, for example, uses small balloons which he inflates and ties to the line as strike indicators. When he buys a new bag of them, he throws all the blue ones away before going on the water. He also has a friend who will not tolerate bananas on board his boat and goes through everyone’s lunch packs and chucks them out at the jetty. Interesting.

We quickly found another shrimper called Capt Andy and had a hook-up immediately the baits went in the water. All I saw was a big silver coloured flash and splash as the fish shot out of the water. “Is it a tarpon?” I asked Bill “I don’t rightly know yet” he replied “But it sure jumped didn’t it”.

Boy was it strong. Line ripped off the multiplier as I dug the rod into the belly belt and just hung on. Stand up fishing is great fun, but brutal on the back and arms without a harness and it wasn’t long before I could feel the strain. This was one tough fish.

When we got him to the boat, we saw why. The large circle hook had caught in the shark’s fin. I couldn’t get its head up to tire it and although Bill leadered it several times, he couldn’t hold it and we got soaked with its tail ripping up the water. The shark got so mad at us that it charged the boat and we all clearly heard its teeth crunching on the hull. Eventually we prevailed and got it aboard for some photos and a quick snip of the leader to get it unhooked.

Gingerly, I put my hand down below the waterline and there were the score marks of the shark’s teeth. “Never seen one do that” drawled Bill scratching his head.

So: my first shark. Not a big one, just a small 60lb or so spinner shark, but it was enough to change my opinion on shark fishing. This was exciting stuff; jumping, acrobatic fish with real power and attitude plus a frisson of danger from the business end of the beast. I could get to like this.

We played tag with Capt. Andy all the rest of the afternoon and did pretty good - three sharks into the boat and another 5 lost either by breaking us or by simply chomping through the nylon leader. One of the break-offs was a pretty big fish and it too charged the boat, the line hissing through the water as it came at us. It went under the boat, then quickly turned on itself and wrapped the line around the prop breaking it off. Hard to tell if it did that deliberately. I don’t ascribe to the theory of smart fish, but I guess that simple self-preservation takes hold and they try whatever they can to get away and use everything they can in their environment to aid them.
The biggest shark we got to the boat went over 100 lbs and was a real brute to land as it was also fin hooked. The circle hooks we were using were excellent though as they avoid the deep hooking which is potentially fatal to fish when dead-baiting. Even the fin hooked fish didn’t bleed and were easily unhooked. I liked this much better than some of my marlin fishing trips where, using traditional “J” hooks, we often released badly bleeding fish back to an uncertain future.

All day we’d had the radio tuned to the newscasts and they made black listening. Bill and Suzanne’s mobiles rang continuously too and I guess that if things had been different that day we’d have caught loads more fish. It was difficult to concentrate, for very understandable reasons. One time, Bill went to set the drag on a reel whilst holding his mobile phone to his ear. A rough wave rocked the boat just at the crucial moment and suddenly he was within a whisker of going overboard. Luckily, I was behind him and grabbed his belt, pulling him back aboard. Mobile phones are more dangerous than you think…

At 4.00pm it was time to go in. It was over an hours run back but it wasn’t nearly so bumpy by then, especially inside the island area. All the way back, the enormities of the days events in New York began to sink in but it wasn’t until we got back to Houston and saw the TV footage that we understood what had befallen America. It is very strange, even now reading this, to think that we were so distant to something so terrible and were actually having fun whilst the world stopped around us. The radio and mobile phones did not convey anything of the horror that the TV images did.  Those TV images were impossible to escape thereafter too and were run and re-run on almost every screen I saw in every place I visited. Some felt it morbid. But no one will forget.

Before this trip, I had visited the US in November 2000 and then I had also met up with Suze, this time in New York itself. We had drinks in the Windows On The World bar, on top of one of the World Trade Towers. It was an incredible experience, holding a cold beer and looking down on the light aircraft and the choppers buzzing over a Manhattan glowing in the sunset. We’d also spent ages going through the shopping malls on the lower floors, buying toys for my kids’ bedrooms - many of which they still play with.

Those buildings were incredible structures, small communities in themselves with thousands of people in them all the time. To think that they were now completely demolished was terrifying. And to think that people, somewhere, planned the exercise meticulously and were most probably very pleased with the outcome was simply too monstrous to deal with.

My aversion to sharks came about because I thought that they were cold blooded, menacing and frightening. However, there is a world of difference between their frightening, primeval, menace and the studied, malevolent menace of the cold-blooded murderers who committed that atrocity on September 11th in the name of Allah.

In their world, undoubtedly, there’s too much religion and not enough God.

Footnote.

Because I was effectively stranded there in Texas for an extra week due to the disaster, I booked another days fishing. Bill was busy that day so he sent me out with another guy called Capt. Jim Leavelle (he of the “No Bananas” rule).

It was a perfect, textbook day with very light winds, clear skies and clear water. The Gulf was like a millpond and I had never been on the sea when it was so calm. There were butterflies, dragonflies, martins and even little hummingbirds flitting about more than 5 miles offshore. Baitfish were everywhere, showing on the surface in small dimples and splashes.

Despite this, we did not get one single bite and never even saw a fish larger than a minnow. Jim told me that in 14 years he had “never, ever, gone all the way out there and not had a bite.” He was exactly what I had always thought a Texan would be like, was Jim.

“Unbileevubull” was all he could say by the end of the day. He’d tried hard too, couldn’t fault the man. We chased all around the Galveston area; covered more than 100 miles end to end plus god-knows how many in between. But not a thing bit the baits. We’d gone out with a whole box of shad deadbait and came back in with the whole box apart from the two baits on the hooks. Didn’t lose a single one, not even to a catfish (“Unbileevubull”) and had a totally blank day.

Well… tell a lie.  I did manage to hook a 250 ton shrimp boat, but since I had foul-hooked it in the nets rather than hooking it cleanly in the bow, I don’t think that we could have claimed the IGFA All Tackle Record even if we had managed to land it…

As often happens, what started as a hobby website grew arms and legs until it eventually became a full-blown book. In February 2004 it was published under the slightly enhanced title Game Fishing Diaries: Details from Fishing in Life and is now available from most outlets from as little a $2.99 on Amazon Kindle. In November 2011 Volume 2 made an appearance also available on Kindle

Game Fishing Diaries - Volume 1

Game Fishing Diaries - Volume 2