Authors: Robson Green
Mike is ex-army and built like a brick shithouse. He’s also got a massive heart. We’d bonded on the
Ocean Pearl
trawler, during thirty-six hours of hell, which was a hundred
times worse for him with a heavy camera on his shoulder, but, unlike me, Mike never complained once. Over the next few nights I talk about my dad and how to face the inevitable. I regale Mike with
stories of my childhood, such as the one and only time Dad took us out fishing in Devon, when I was seven and David was five. David and I were really seasick so the captain suggested he turn the
boat around but my father said, ‘No way, I’ve paid five pound. We are staying out ’til we get a fish.’ We came back with one mackerel, which Mum cooked and made a right mess
of. Dad doesn’t get fishing – to him it’s inactive and boring. His favourite hobby is drinking; he loves it and could have won many medals had dipsomania been an Olympic
discipline. I once witnessed him devour eighteen pints and still manage to walk home – I have never been so proud. He fell over the hedge in the front garden but it was a grand effort all the
same.
Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Seeing as we aren’t going out on the trawler to catch tuna, we have to find something else to film. So we decide to do a PTC on Cape Cod and the history of the name.
In 1602, a chap called Bartholomew Gosnold, an eminent English lawyer, explorer and privateer, went fishing and caught a few cod with a collective weight of 1,000 pounds, as you do. (Sadly
we’re not going to catch any today as the cod are too small due to overfishing and therefore not extreme enough.) Having rather a lot of sway and also having discovered the area first, he
decreed it should henceforth be known as Cape Cod. He also named Martha’s Vineyard after his daughter. I wonder if they’ll name a place after me one day? Perhaps a cricket field in
Northumberland – Robson’s Green – or a bridge I once fished off. I can dream.
(I actually wasn’t named Robson when I was a baby. Believe it or not for two days my name was Gary Green, but then Dad turned up, took the band off my arm and gave me his own name. Thank
God he did. I can’t think of many hip Garys off the top of my head. Well, there’s Gary Oldman: extremely cool. Gary Lineker: quite cool. Gary Glitter: hmm, death penalty springs to
mind. I’m very glad I’m Robson. It’s a name that belongs to the mining communities of the northeast and it’s common for the eldest son to have a surname as a first name. In
fact, in my class at middle school there was me, Robson Green, and my mate Robson Brown. I kid you not.)
Anyway, the history of this part of New England is also pivotal in the founding of modern America. In September 1620 the
Mayflower
set sail from England and that November she landed on
the shores of Cape Cod, most probably near Provincetown, aka ‘P-Town’, nowadays the gay capital and party town of Massachusetts. Probably not what the highly religious Pilgrim Fathers
had in mind, but I’ve heard Burger Queen is worth a visit. In December 1620 the Plymouth Colony was founded and the rest, as they say, is American history. But there is also another important
historical fact associated with the Cape and this one I actually know a lot about. Here’s a clue: the famous score is just two notes played on a cello, over and over again. Dur-nur, dur-nur,
dur-nur-dur-nur . . . faster and faster . . . That’s right, it was the setting for
Jaws
. Over the summer of 1974, when Steven Spielberg was just twenty-seven, they filmed all around
here and Martha’s Vineyard. Usually movies were shot in a studio, but the young maverick Spielberg wanted to prove himself and took the gamble to shoot in the ocean. There were many
near-drownings and the film was fraught with setbacks, not least when the $250,000 mechanical shark was finally ready for his close-up and turned out to be cross-eyed and a bit, well,
rubbish-looking. He also sank to the bottom of Nantucket Sound and all his electricals had to be overhauled. Not to mention that Jaws was worse than me in the high-maintenance stakes: every night
he had to be hosed down and freshly painted. Spielberg knew he was facing a flop so he went back to the drawing board. He later said, ‘I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story
without the shark. So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock: “What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this?”’ He realised ‘it’s what we don’t see that is
truly frightening’, and thus made a classic by featuring the shark as little as possible.
Great whites are in fact rare off Cape Cod but there are plenty of other sharks, such as the vicious mako, which is what I’m off to catch this morning. Known round these parts as
‘the taxman’, mako can take 70 per cent or even 90 per cent chunks out of your quarry when fishing, which is known as being taxed.
As I walk down to the aptly named Green Harbour (hopefully not named after a forebear who lost his life to a shark), the only question is: are we going to need a bigger boat? I meet Tom de
Persia and his son, Jeff, who run several sports fishing charters off the Cape. Today we’re heading two hours east into the Atlantic to go in search of this ultimate predator. It’s
beautiful out at sea, the sun is rising, the dolphins are swimming, but bloody hell, Tom is driving the boat like an utter madman. It’s obvious he hasn’t skippered in a while by the way
he is battering the boat at speed into the waves. Jeff is more of an able seaman and is losing patience with his father’s incompetence. As we are all thrown around the boat, Jeff shouts,
‘What the hell are you doing, Dad?’ Let’s just say they seem to have a somewhat strained relationship. I think Tom is just desperate to be on camera.
The mako shark is the fastest shark in the ocean and the third-fastest creature on the planet. They are capable of jumping twenty feet out of the water and are responsible for taking many a
chunk out of fishermen who land them on their boats. We will not be landing our mako, as shark fishing is part of a catch-and-release programme, which means any taxmen we catch will be
electronically tagged so that marine biologists can study feeding, breeding and extreme fiscal pillaging, and other habits of this fearsome creature.
To attract these predators we have got to get the smell of blood in their nostrils, so out goes the chum crate full of ground-up smelly fish. We drag the crate behind the boat, to encourage
sharks to head straight for us – it’s definitely counter-intuitive. I am looking for dorsal fins in the water, trying to act casual. When the sharks do get near the boat we are going to
try to hook one using balloons.
‘Are we throwing the mako a party?’ I ask.
Jeff explains that the balloon acts as a bobber, so when the shark bites the balloons pop. Because of the waves and the swell it’s sometimes difficult to see where the bait has dropped; in
this instance we’re using bonito, which is a medium-sized mackerel-type fish. The bright-coloured balloon is an extreme version of a fish float, and if we accidentally fall asleep (which is
quite possible when out fishing) the loud bang will hopefully wake us up. Well, that’s the theory.
Jeff has been fishing since he was born. In fact, when he came out of the womb, the first thing his parents gave him was a rod – well, almost the first thing. They probably gave him a kiss
and then a good glug of milk and
then
the rod. Jeff is fascinated by sharks and saw
Jaws
before he went on his first shark-fishing trip with his dad. He has seen the film twenty-six
times at the cinema. I myself saw
Jaws
six times at the Newcastle Odeon (now a car park) with my best mate Keith Jobson; we watched
Star Wars
sixteen times.
As I wait for a bite, I jabber at the crew and camera. The sun gleams on the water and I check every bump and ripple for signs of movement. I really don’t want to spot a grey dorsal fin
cutting through the waves like a scalpel, but then again I really do. What is it about humans and the need to scare the shit out of ourselves? Spielberg is right, it’s the things we
can’t see that scare us the most, so I suppose shark fishing is a way of facing your fears, literally. It’s also borne out of pure curiosity to see and know more about what lurks
beneath. To my mind it’s bloody bonkers, but I am contractually obliged!
I imagine I’m in the barrel scene of the movie. The shark is circling Quint’s boat. Quint loads a harpoon and attaches it to a plastic barrel. He shoots Jaws. The predator is now
very pissed off and takes the barrel on a very fast journey. He disappears and so does the barrel. Where’s the shark gone? John Williams’s cello music is playing in my head: dur-nur,
dur-nur, dur-nur. Every glimmer looks like movement and my eyes are in overdrive. I’m seeing shapes everywhere. I stare at the balloon waiting for it to pop. I wait. But a watched balloon
never bursts.
Two hours later and we’ve got bugger-all, I am still in one piece and I’m bored. I’m also absolutely freezing my nuts off out here. Quint never looked cold but then, compared
to Orkney Islander Robert Shaw, who played the grizzly fisherman, I am a soft Southerner. He was probably warmed up by rum, as he wasn’t shy of a drink. Shaw was an incredibly talented man
and actually wrote the USS
Indianapolis
monologue scene in which Quint explains his violent hatred of sharks. Watch it again, it’s brilliant. He died in 1978 of a heart attack but is
on my imaginary list of top five people of all time to go on the lash with, the others being: Oliver Reed, Peter Sellers, Errol Flynn and, weirdly, Michael Bublé.
Suddenly I swear I see something break the surface of the water. Jeff isn’t sure. The balloon starts moving towards us very slowly. I don’t think we are going to need a bigger boat.
It’s about the pace of a Chihuahua paddling under the surface. We pull up the line – ‘It’s a shark!’ Just the wrong bloody kind. It’s a small spiny dogfish. I
grab him by the tail and hold him up to camera. He’s got two small dorsal fins and really rough skin, and reminds me of an ex-girlfriend.
As we pop him back, Tom suggests we perhaps try to catch a bluefin tuna instead. Jamie says no, because we are now going to do that on a trawler at the end of the week and our catch is likely to
be much bigger than it would be here. We all agree to stick with the shark fishing. But right at the time of the discussion, Jamie’s phone starts beeping. It’s a text from the captain
of the trawler 100 miles out at sea. It simply says ‘They’ve gone’, meaning the tuna.
‘Thank fuck we didn’t go out with them. It would have been a complete waste of time,’ I say.
I have never been so happy in my whole life to miss three days on a blinking trawler without the prospect of catching a single fish. And it’s all down to my dad.
Jamie looks at his phone for a while.
‘OK, let’s catch a bluefin,’ he says.
Thank God for that. I’m always happier catching a fish we can actually eat, rather than one that wants to eat me. We head further out into the Atlantic, now in pursuit of
Thunnus
thynnus
, which can grow to the size of a small car and put up one hell of a fight. The birds are feeding, which means only one thing: big fish are gorging on bait fish.
We set out our lines, baited with plastic jelly skip bait that replicates sardines or mackerel in the water, and begin to trawl. Jeff can see bluefin tuna leaping 100 yards away. We head towards
them. The suspense is killing me but after half an hour there are still no bites. Surely I’m not going to miss out again. All of a sudden, one of the reels starts to scream. I take the rod,
with the help of Jeff, and plug it into my special ‘mangina’. The pull on the line is incredible. It feels like a massive bluefin tuna but that could be wishful thinking. The muscles in
my back are stretched to their limit but still the fish keeps running.
‘This is a big fish! Such a strong, powerful, ocean-going Ferrari!’
I slowly wind in but the fish takes out more and more line.
‘You hear that? That is the sound of power. He’s turning me round, he’s turning me round. Oh, stop, please! This is some beast, I’m telling you now we’re in for
some shock if we get this on board,’ I yell out to anyone who’s listening.
After twenty minutes he seems to tire and I can wind him in again . . . As the fish gets nearer, the pull gets stronger. I am in real trouble; my back is knackered and I’m in serious
pain.
‘Oh, it’s going under the boat!’ I shout.
Shooting pains are making me feel sick but I can’t lose this fish. I ask Jeff if I am doing something wrong or standing incorrectly.
‘No, this is what they do to you,’ he says, as I heave the rod up and reel with all my might. ‘You’re gonna want to stay right in this corner and swing him out. There you
go, get a crank.’
‘I can’t!’
‘There you go, you’re doing good,’ says Jeff. ‘We got colour!’
I look at the side of the boat. It’s a monster. How on earth are we going to get it on board? I am dizzy with pain.
‘Ready, 3, 2, 1 . . .’
Jeff and Tom heave the tuna on board and I go mental, like a schoolboy with ADHD, shouting, ‘That’s why we came here! Look at that fish! Oh, yes, man, get in! Whoah! This is why we
came to Boston, this is why we came to Cape Cod. We did it, Jeff, you’re the man. Tom de Persia’s the man. What have we got, a hundred and twenty, hundred and fifty-pound?!’
Jeff confirms it’s a 150-pound bluefin. It’s astonishing. I suddenly experience a release of tension; all the anxieties I have been storing up about my father are exorcised in that
moment. This bluefin symbolises that everything is going to be OK. I sit on deck holding the fish in my arms, completely overwhelmed. I can’t stop looking at every inch in admiration. The
Latin name
Thunnus
means ‘to dart away quickly’, which is spot-on because this shinning metallic and silvery creature is made of pure muscle and is one of the fastest animals on
the planet. Its design is incredible: the dorsal fin fits into a slot and comes up like a small jib when needed and then goes down again into a groove to make it streamlined, like a jet. It is
beautiful, quite beautiful, but its striking eyes seem doleful and part of me is sad to have taken this creature from its home in the ocean. It’s a paradox of emotions: I’m overwhelmed
at the hunt but it’s tinged with melancholy at the fish’s sacrifice. However, nothing will go to waste and that is how we show respect for the creatures whose lives we take, by not
wasting a morsel and, like the Native Americans, giving thanks in our hearts. This fish will now become a part of me, and much bigger parts of my hungry crew. Bluefin tuna is around $40 per pound,
so ours is worth over $6,000. We take a slab of the vibrant pink meat to a sushi restaurant near the harbour, where Kong the chef prepares it. He explains that the best part of the tuna for sashimi
is the o-toro cut, which is the fattiest part of the belly, up near the head. It’s a very pale pink meat that melts on the tongue. Other cuts are the akami, pure red meat from the back of the
fish (my favourite), and chu-toro, marbled pink belly meat that is rich and buttery in taste. We eat with Tom, Jeff and the rest of crew. The sushi is delicious, among the best I have ever tasted;
just like the tuna I tried off the coast of Costa Rica, it tastes clean.