A Lesson from my Father

My father named me Ishmael. I suspect that he did it as a joke, somehow knowing that I would grow up to work on boats. He certainly didn’t do it because of a love of Herman Melville’s writing; other than the Sunday papers, largely for the obituaries and sports pages, he read very little. He wasn’t Jewish either. No, my father was the sort of Christian who attended church every couple of Sundays each month (ours was a run-down little Presbyterian chapel, its white paint stripped in parts by sea foam and salt air) but otherwise thought little of religion. That was probably why things didn’t work out with my mother, who thought a great deal about religion (but of course, made an exception when signing the divorce papers).

Anyway, I’ve become side-tracked. My father named me Ishmael, for reasons only he will ever know, and now I work on boats. Of course, a lot happened in between these two things, very little of it important. As you can imagine, my childhood was dominated by Moby Dick inspired taunts, none of which were ever very witty, original, or, now that years have passed, traumatic. One of the few blessings of living in a forgotten fishing town on the edge of the Atlantic is that the education system is so criminally under-funded and under-staffed that most would-be bullies end up being too stupid to invent effective taunts.

One of the other blessings is the awe-inspiring beauty of the cold ocean in full swell. It enraptures, all at once repelling with sheer, terrifying power whilst also beckoning with promises of adventure and discovery. I had wanted to sail it since I had been able to want anything; as a small boy, I could not be left unsupervised by the docks for fear that I would plunge myself into the harbour and once I learned to swim, I did it more than I walked. That caused the handful of friends I had to start calling me ‘Fishmael’. Fortunately, the name never really stuck.

I’ve drifted off topic again. I think that’s a side-effect of spending so much time working on boats with just a handful of other people; as soon as you find someone to talk to onshore, you’ll talk about anything and everything. I will get to the sharks soon, I promise.

Aside from naming me Ishmael, my father impacted my life in one other significant way. Whilst his choice of name was deliberate, this second act was entirely unintentional: ironic, even.

My father was a fisherman. There were few other things to do in my hometown, and even fewer that he was qualified for. Perhaps that’s why he named me Ishmael; maybe he assumed that I would follow in his footsteps. Being out on the wild ocean was all he knew and probably all that he loved. I don’t have many memories of my father smiling but all of them involve him standing on deck or hauling in the day’s catch.

The boats that he worked on mainly fished for cod and haddock but would bring anything back to port: herring, plaice, Atlantic salmon, mackerel, you name it. “A net full of lampreys is better than a net full of air,” he would always shout when unloading a miscellany of sea creatures, ready to be packed into iceboxes and shipped to places far more prosperous than our small town.

It was one such haul that unwittingly impacted my life. I must have been twelve or thirteen, right on the cusp of a tempest of hormones and teenage angsts. My father always expected me to be on the docks when his boat came in; I had fast hands and an eye for detail, just what was needed for sorting the different types and sizes of fish. It was also, as he never tired of saying, “a way to earn your keep”. So, there I was, standing, waiting, watching as the trawler with the catch of the day pulled up to the moorings.

The harbour had never been modernised (and still hasn’t, as far as I’m aware), so the fishermen would always dump their catch out onto a huge tarp, which was hosed down with sea water at the end of each day. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smell of fish, sweat, and salt that hung in the air on those days. You’d probably imagine it to be disgusting, but it is strangely nostalgic for me.

Anyway, there I am, twelve- or thirteen-year-old Ishmael, watching as my hard-ass of a fisherman father and the rest of the crew unload a net that is swarming with fish. By the time they’ve been hauled out of the ocean and brought ashore, many of them have suffocated in the air. But there are always plenty still flapping away, desperately trying to twitch themselves back into the wash. The sound is like the pitter-patter of feet on a wet day, or distant applause.

On that day, the one that changed my life forever, it wasn’t just the usual mixture of fish that got hauled ashore. A shark had got caught up in the net as well. It can’t have been an old one: it was, what, three feet long, maybe four. I remember a shriek going up as one of the other kids saw it. Everyone jumped back, except my father, who marched over. “North Atlantic white,” he said, pointing at its white belly and grey back. “Young ‘un.”

The shark was still alive. I could see its gills pulsing, desperately and hopelessly trying to extract oxygen from the cold sea air. It would lie still for a moment or two and then thrash from side to side, rolling around on top of this pile of death. I looked into one of its eyes – people always say that shark eyes give them the creeps, that it’s unnatural for a creature to have no pupil, and that that’s why they know that they’re these monstrous maneaters. That’s why I hate the film Jaws – well, one of the reasons I hate it – it’s that line where the shark hunter with the big sideburns and moustache goes on about their eyes and how they’re all lifeless, you know, ‘like a doll’s eyes’. That film did lots of things for sharks, and none of them good. Anyway, I looked into this dying creature’s eyes, and I swear, pupil or no pupil, I could feel it looking back, not like some demon that wanted to taste my flesh, but like a living thing, desperate to live and to go back to where it belonged.

My father must have seen my face and mistaken my shock for horror. I’ll never forget how he put a hairy, tanned arm across my chest, holding me back, and said “don’t worry son, I’ll sort this.” I thought he was going to roll it over the edge and back into the water, but he grasped an oar that one of the other sailors had been holding, and beat the poor thing to death with it, right there and then. It must have taken five or six hits and all the while I couldn’t stand to break eye contact with that sorry, desperate, dying creature. When he was done, he threw it into an extra-sized icebox and said, “I know a restaurant a few counties over that’ll pay us stupid money for this.” Everyone laughed and as far as my father was concerned, that was that.

I don’t remember much of what happened straight after. I must have run like hell, leaving someone else to sort and pack the fish. Eventually, I ended up on the cliffs, looking down on the town and the ocean beyond. It was one of those moments you only get on the coast, where the water is almost black and the clouds above are just as dark, save for a crack of sun breaking through like a harpoon, painting streaks of water gold and red. I cried my eyes out on that clifftop. I cried for the shark that had been brutally murdered, and for every other creature that had met such a fate. Thinking back on it now, I guess I cried for the loss of the last shred of the illusion that my father was not a good man. I didn’t know then that the shark was a protected species; I didn’t need that info to see that what he did was just vicious.

So, aside from the fact that I’m still yapping on about it, you’re probably wondering how that changed my life. Well, it ruled out me ever becoming a fisherman for starters. I didn’t tell my father this; it had always been an unspoken assumption that I would follow in his footsteps, so my decision not to was also unspoken.

I knew that my future still lay at sea though. I had always known this but the incident at the docks made me realise exactly what my life’s work was going to be; that was what finally dragged me down from the cliffs. The next day, I worked up the guts to ask my science teacher what grades I needed to get a job in marine conservation (I didn’t know that it was called that at the time, which probably showed that getting the grades was going to be an uphill battle). I don’t think he had ever been asked what grades were needed for anything; he told me that he didn’t know but that he would write to some colleges and find out, which he did.

I won’t bore you with the details of how I got those grades, or the many arguments with my father, who thought the whole thing an absurd waste of time and money, as well as an indication that I thought that I was better than him and everyone else in town. It’s enough to say that I now know more about sharks than pretty much everyone (small boys included). Did you know, for example, that there are hundreds of different species, and that one-hundred-and-forty-three are currently classified as endangered? That’s why the boat I work on doesn’t have a single net or harpoon on board; everything we do is for monitoring, researching, and protecting these beautiful species; they’ve been on this planet for over four-hundred-million years, and I’m determined to help them last a bit longer.

I mourned that shark for years. Looking back, I think that’s the whole reason I got into this business. Some childlike part of me was desperate for forgiveness or redemption and blamed myself for not doing something to save it. Even now, I get chills when I think about what happened. The guilt is gone, though. I think it probably left me the day I saved my first shark. Some old netting had got tangled up around a juvenile tiger shark and it couldn’t swim freely. Cutting it loose was the moment I knew that it had all been worth it.

So, if my father did name me Ishmael as a joke, then the joke’s on him. Thanks, dad, for making me who I am today and for all the sharks you’ve saved as a result, even if you never meant to.

Thank you for reading this story. I hope that it has inspired you to learn more about sharks and to do what you can to help preserve them.

• American Shark Conservancy
• The Shark Trust
• Bite-Back Shark and Marine Conservation