All photographs © copyright and available for use elsewhere, a license is required to be purchased for 3 years or 5 years use.
Category: Sharks
A brief summary for this Hong Kong recipe. The skin of the fin is removed. The fin is boiled with a chicken for many hours. The chicken cannot be a rooster or a hen that has produced any or many eggs.
This restaurant in Taipei caters for visiting Japanese tourists.
Soup is served bubbling hot, boiling in a bowl. Small plates of 1. vegetables 2. a sweet and sour sauce 3. XO sauce are added to the soup in stages as it is being consumed so as to alter and create new tastes.
This restaurant will charge about US $40 for the soup as a dinner which also includes a small-to-medium sized Chilean abalone in special sauce, plus dessert.
Opposition
Many of the arguments used by China, Japan, Russia and several North African countries to oppose the measure were expected to be recycled by delegates later this week when proposals to tightening regulations on the shark trade are considered.
China and Russia argued that shark populations aren’t suffering. Japan insisted that current measures in place are more than adequate. Developing countries like Libya and Morocco complained that any effort to protect sharks would damage the economies of poor fishing nations and burden them with expensive enforcement requirements.
The Chinese delegation said there was no scientific evidence that the shark’s survival is threatened and CITES was not the right forum to handle the issue. The Chinese would prefer to leave regulation to existing tools like the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and regional bodies which conservationists argue have failed to crackdown on illegal fishing and even uphold their own modest quotas. (Courtesy: Associated Press).
It looks like a piece of fish and has the texture of crab. This is Surimi. Meanwhile a lot of shark meat is being sold to compensate for a world decline in fin fishes. In other words, sharks are no longer wasted – unless the shark is over a certain length considered too big for handling. In that case the fishermen decide it’s fate. Whatever that is, the fins are not removed (unless a fisheries law is about to be broken).
Tiger shark about to bite the pole camera (1975).
We were on a diving safari on the New South Wales north coast. A fisherman in a club told us of “a monster” tangled in his deepwater fish trap line. He failed to recognize the catch and was quite frightened of what he saw without a face mask handy.
We helped bring his catch home the next day with our twin 40 hp outboards doing the work his boat could not handle.
As fishermen need to do, the ‘monster’ was disposed of – it was a prize catch. The ‘meat’ sent to the fish markets in Sydney, the ‘saw’ retained as a souvenier by the fisherman, the late Keith Knox of Minniewater near Wooli, NSW. He spoke of the encounter for many years as a great adventure.
This is first and only sawfish any of us have seen alive and underwater to this present era. The photograph recently ‘surfaced’ and was signed by the glamourous young model posing with my speargun for this tongue-in-cheek picture.
A satire on ‘divers and their sea trophies’, extendable to all fishermen, all over the world.
Photos: John Harding collection
Grey nurse sharks were protected especially to give tourist divers something worthwhile to look at, and to shut-up a handful of environmentalists with underwater camera’s who were conning the media into thinking only 500 sharks existed.
How anyone could possibly count all the sharks at every reef on the east coast never occurred to the media, they just ran with the fairy story while the Fisheries responded with a protective ban.
The bottom line is, it was probably a good thing to have the species protected.
Suggestion for an aspiring PhD student: Investigate the link between past onshore droughts and ‘vanishing sharks’ to determine if there is a connection why this species was scarce in the years before 1986. Include power head spears in the equation, plus professional fishing catches processed through markets.
Christine Danaher approaches a small grey nurse shark resting under a reef ledge. Located north of Forster, New South Wales, the area has been called Taurus Reef by local dive charter boats. When the flash went off the shark bolted.
Captain Wally Muller navigated using a sextant, the era pre GPS
Divers, John M Harding (senior) and Roy Bisson (on right)
This was the longest voyage undertaken by the famous charter boat in 1971. Newly launched the boat was 79′ in length and had accommodation for 16 divers (later reduced to 12), plus a crew of four.
The lure for such a voyage was shell collecting, a search for the rare volute thatcheri. Half the charter cost was paid by shell collectors. I was sponsored by a tabloid newspaper to write and photograph five stories that could be serialized over one week.
Text written especially for divers would be published in Fathom No.6 issue. Art director and diver, Roy Bisson being on the voyage.
From San Francisco the late Dewey Bergman (Sea and Sea Travel) was scouting on this voyage for what would become regular parties of American divers and underwater cameramen. The world was about to discover diving Australian style. The future voyages would not involve so much traveling time.
Marion Reef was the new inshore destination, still in The Coral Sea and today almost unvisited due to fuel cost considerations.
The Chesterfield Reef trip was our most memorable. Near perfect weather and a good crew of professional divers. For further information, including names of shipwrecks at Chesterfield Reef, see Wikipedia.org
Roy Bisson swim fins (flippers) were filmed simultaneously by my movie camera and another by Richard Ibara. This was Chesterfield Reef at it’s best. Grey Reef sharks were territorial with these displays as they probably had not encountered divers before.
