The End Of The Basking Shark

January 23, 2007

Release from: Fred Davies
Parksville Qualicum News (Canada)

Weighing in at up to five tonnes and 40 feet in length it’s a creature surrounded by mystery and misunderstanding. Once abundant off the coasts of Vancouver Island the toothless and non-predatory Basking shark — second largest fish in the world and source of the Cadborosaurus myth — now produces perhaps one sighting a year in B.C., yet still they have no protection.

Now a new book Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of B.C.’s Gentle Giants documents the federal government sanctioned slaughter of the plankton eating behemoths that began in the 1950s and continued until their near complete demise in provincial waters was a foregone conclusion.

“I had never heard of Basking sharks when I moved to Bamfield, says Gentle Giants co-author, and marine conservationist with the David Suzuki Foundation, Scott Wallace. “Both the Sierra Club and the federal government wanted a report on basking sharks. They were asking me if there were any marine fish that should be considered endangered but aren’t.”

That question was the genesis of an exploration into what happened to the once prevalent fish.

It was this journey that led Wallace to find Brian Gisborne — his eventual co-author and a commercial fisherman for 18 years — who recalls seeing hundreds of Basking sharks in his youth. His last sighting though occurred in 1973.

“He had binders full of information,” says Wallace, who notes Parksville at one time was advertised as the shark-fishing Mecca of the Pacific Northwest.

Parksville resident Bill Fullerton, 64, recalls a time in his teens living in Bamfield when Basking sharks were plentiful and harpooned for sport.

“They were all over the place,” he says. “I harpooned one in Kelp Bay about four or five miles up the Alberni Inlet.”

Fullerton says the Basking sharks were considered a nuisance in the fishing industry because they would get caught up in gillnets causing considerable damage and expense.

“Not only would they tangle themselves in the nets but there is a slime on the surface of their skin that has an odour. The fish smell it and keep away

“The nets were 200 feet long or so stretched along the surface of the water. Boats were staggered all over the inlet,” says Fullerton.

The retired B.C. forestry worker describes how he and his friends would sneak up on groups of Basking sharks, named for their predilection to group together nearly motionless on the surface of shallower waters.

“They were very slow to react,” he says. “Four or five of us in speed boats would tie up to a 45 gallon drum. You’d motor up slowly at trolling speeds and get within five feet of them. I used a harpoon with an eight-foot shaft.”

Fullerton says that once a shark was hit the point of the harpoon was designed to turn at a 90-degree angle, biting into the flesh and creating an anchor.

“There would be a tug of war for a while,” he says. “If there was no pull in either direction you knew he might be coming towards you.

“We more or less never used any part of them,” adds Fullerton.

While it may sound barbaric in the modern day parlance of conservation and eco-tourism, such methods aimed at eradicating the shark population were encouraged at the time.

Wallace and Gisborne’s book documents a media fed frenzy of antagonism towards the sharks with articles such as a front page Victoria Times feature in 1955 with a photo caption that read:

“This is a basking shark, basking and leering. But the smirk will soon be wiped off its ugly face by the fisheries department, which is cutting numerous sharks down to size.”

Indeed Fisheries Canada was complicit in the sharks’ eventual eradication, designing a cutting blade that was placed on the bow of the Comox Post patrol vessel. Sharks cruising obliviously on the surface would be cut in half.

“That was the main slaughter technique,” says Wallace. “They weren’t thinking the same way then.

“I’d say we still do things that are equally as wrong although the visuals aren’t so gross,” he continues citing deep-sea bottom trawling, with its unselective destruction of marine habitat, as but one example of environmental degradation occurring just under the wider public’s radar.

There is some hope for the remaining few sharks that might be left in local waters though it is almost certainly too little, too late.

The federal government, Wallace says, “will review the report I’ve written for them. I imagine the Basking shark will be listed as an endangered species.”