Damien Enright: On a 'certain strand' gotcha, hook, line, sinker

Shore angler Jeremy Smith with a 2.5kg (5.5lbs) Gilthead Bream caught on Courtmacsherry Bay last month. Spider crabs, 20 cm (8In) diameter, often snipped anglers’ lines, taking hook, bait and sinker.

In June, anglers at a ‘certain strand’ near Courtmacsherry Bay (they’ll say no more) were joyously hauling in fine, fat gilthead bream, a new fish in these waters, when overnight, they found themselves reeling in their lines minus not only the hoped-for bream but hook, bait, and sinker. Thinking themselves fortunate upon feeling a bite, they’d strike with a sharp lift of the rod, only to feel the line go limp as they reeled it in and drew it onto the sand stripped of the gear it was cast out with.

What creatures could have done this? The lines had not just been stripped of the bait; they had been disarmed. When a friend told me about it, my first thought was that fugu fish, aka pufferfish, had, as a new global warming phenomenon, arrived on our south coast like they had arrived off La Gomera in the Canaries in the last few years, and wreaked havoc on the hand lines of local fishermen who fished not for sport but for a living. I wrote about them on June 22.