THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Let's look at the pro's and con's of each in turn, starting with what I consider to be the least likely,
working through to the most likely. Two fish tie as least likely candidates, these being the mako shark
and blue fin tuna. In 2013, Andy Griffith fishing aboard the UK's top shark boat 'White Water III'
skippered by Andrew Alsop took the first mako in UK or Irish waters in thirty seven years.
Unlike porbeagle sharks, and to a lesser extent blue sharks, mako sharks are warm water oceanic
wanderers. So if, as the climate scientists keep telling us, sea temperatures have been noticeably rising
thereby increasing the likelihood of such an encounter over the past three decades and more, then we
should have been seeing progressively more mako sharks rather than less. But we haven't. So how much
time have you got to invest in that particular project.
Moving on to unlikely candidate number two, back in 2010 I recorded an audio interview with a chap
called Bill Pashby over at Scarborough. Bill had been the oarsman of a small rowing boat dropped from
his fathers chartered trawler many miles out in the North Sea who would take out wealthy clients
wanting to fish for what he called tunny, but we now call blue fin tuna.
When the commercial herring boats were hand hauling their drift nets, damaged and still living fish
would drop back into the water acting as chum for the big tuna, which would gather around some boats
picking off the victims.
Bill's dad would get a call to say which boats had them around and they would motor over, then drop
the rowing boat down in which Bill and his tunny angler would row across. Doing this, his clients took
dozens of fish to over eight hundred pounds.
The tuna didn't suddenly disappear from the North Sea during the 1950's. But the herrings were certainly
in danger of going down that route and something had to be done.
The response was that a moratorium on herring fishing was put in place, which besides bringing about
the total collapse of a way of life for many east coast fishermen and their wives who followed the 'silver
darlings' from port to port, also marked the end of rod and line fishing for the big Yorkshire tunny, as
there was no longer any means of locating them.
Over-fishing by the Danes also had an
effect by decreasing tuna population
numbers. Then around the millennium,
anglers became aware of big tuna
running up the west coast of Ireland
where they began targeting them with
live-baits and trolled lures, eventually
bringing specimens ashore to well over
nine hundred pounds.
Unfortunately, a great deal of
investment in time and fuel was
Alastair Wilson, big Blue Fin Tuna Warrior dinghy required to find the quickly moving
tuna pods, on top of which, after just a
few seasons, the Irish skippers such as
Michael McVeigh and Adrian Molloy eventually had to remove the outriggers and fighting chairs from
their boats as a sharp decline in numbers pretty much made searching for them in the vast open expanse
of the Atlantic a no hoper.
So again, as with the mako shark, not something to get too tied up with as one element of a much larger,
and of itself, already highly time consuming life time quest. That said, more recently, an odd tuna has
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