An odd thing for an astro site maybe, but this old story just entered my head and so I thought I’d better write it down before it was completely forgotten.
As an East End kid who had just gone out to New Zealand (1966-1968) one of the things this great country captivated me with was the fantastic fishing. I could spend all day on Clacton pier or Southend pier without even a bite, but here in New Zealand it was (at that time anyway) impossible to spend a day fishing without catching something.
On this particular day I was fishing off Devonport Wharf. I was down very near sea-level on a wooden platform. I was using 40 pound breaking strain monofilament (that’s a bit heavy and ambitious really) on a hand-held reel with a small hook and a mussel as bait (there were tons of HUGE mussels all around the pilings on the wharf). After the hook had been lying on the bottom for about half an hour I decided to pull it up to take a look. I gave a big heave, the line stretched a bit, and I thought I had hooked into a piling. But as I kept the tension on, the line elasticity pulled in a bit, it was moving (a little) so I decided it was a loose log, or a bit of concrete, and I would pull up as much line as possible before cutting the line and letting the garbage sink back to the bottom.
Thus began a series of me wrapping the line around my arm, doing a deadlift to stretch the line, waiting a bit for the line to retract, and then repeating. Some bloke who was watching what was going on up on the top of the wharf came down onto the platform to see what was going on. He asked what was happening and I said I think it’s just a log and I’m trying to get as much line back as possible. He watched me pulling up more and more line until the water in front of the platform suddenly went dark. The bloke let out a scream and went running up to the top of the wharf. I saw the dark “thing” slowly slide back into the depths (which I still thought was a log) and brought up the rest of the line with a straightened hook on the end.
When I spoke to the bloke back on top of the wharf he said it was a ginormous stingray and that’s why he took off. It would have been over 6 foot across the wings from the dark shape in the water.
Apparently this stingray was well-known to fishermen at Devonport wharf and had escaped many of them during the years – he was called “Fred”. About a month ot two later Fred was finally captured and pulled onto a boat fishing off the wharf. Fred was a 200-pound stingray. I don’t know whether they let Fred go or not, I really hope they did.
