The lure of sharks - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 119

he know that in a few hours the tremendous currents that surge up and
down the Gulf every time the tide changes would carry his shark and its
float miles away? I was sure he'd never see the fish or the tube again.
We planned to do more fishing with the smaller longlines and were
just rounding the north point when our 150-horsepower Mercury out-
board made a screeching sound like tortured metal and shuddered to
a stop. It was completely seized up. What now? We were about three
miles from San Felipe in a heavy boat with one locked-up engine and
two little paddles. A slight breeze was blowing south toward town,
though, so we optimistically hung the vinyl shark stretcher from the
shark-lifting davits to make a crude sail, and soon we were sailing along
at a barely perceptible speed. Of course, if the current had started to
run north, we would have gone backward at a much higher pace.
We had plenty of drinking water on board—a wise precaution in
these unpredictable waters—so we just lay back and relaxed. A couple
of hours went by and along came a Mexican fisherman in his trusty
panga, one of the sturdy, e‹cient, seaworthy fishing ski¤s used all over
Mexico. A 50-horsepower Johnson outboard planes these impressive
little boats along at a very respectable speed and fuel economy, regardless
of their load. Laughing at our predicament and our huge nonfunctional
engine, the fisherman kindly gave us a tow back in to San Felipe.
That pretty much ended the reconnaissance trip for sharks: there
wasn't much we could do with an inoperative boat. Still, despite the
brevity of the trip, we had learned something. Because we'd caught white
sharks, which like cool water, we concluded that this was the wrong
time of year for the tropical sharks we wanted. We had chosen this time
of year to avoid the problems that scorching hot weather would have
caused if we'd tried to ship live sharks up to San Diego. But clearly that
didn't help if our quarry was basking in the warmer waters of southern
Mexico.
L OSING SEA WORLD'S BOAT
We decided to resume our shark hunt in the early fall, when the water
would still be quite warm but the air would not be a hundred-plus de-
grees like it is in the middle of summer. Even though our reconnais-