You never forget your first fish. Mine was a tiny flat scaly thing - I’m guessing a sunfish - that I caught with a handmade pole at a pond somewhere in western Massachusetts. It was a Tom Sawyer moment, since I was fishing alone in a few inches of murky water obscured by lily pads with every expectation of landing a monster.
Honestly, the fish was less memorable than the bait. My hook was an open safety pin tied to the pole with string. I pierced the armored abdomen of a tiny yellow grasshopper, slid through the gushy part, and out the other side. The bug flailed on the hook, legs twitching, as a perfectly round bubble of black goo formed on his mouthy-part. I knew even then I wasn’t going to be a fisherman.
But my equipment worked. My first fish lived for awhile in a colorful plastic pail. I’m sure I threw him back, but probably not in time since he floated off like a fallen leaf. I have half a dozen more fish tales, but around here, best to stay silent, especially with photos of locals displaying 60- to 140-pound halibut in the pages of this newspaper.
Which reminded me of these two big fish photos from the Portsmouth Athenaeum archives. The first photo shows a man posing with an ocean sunfish, and not a large one. While an adult often weighs in at one ton, the record holder reportedly reached 14-feet from fin to fin and hit 5,000 pounds.
"They’re very unusual," Willy Bemis, former director of the Shoals Marine Lab at Appledore Island told me. "They’re the heaviest of the bony fishes. They’re extremely prolific, quite common, and make millions of eggs. Their larvae are quite gorgeous. They look like spiked Christmas ornaments and are about the size of a pea."
The skin of the ocean sunfish is like a plastic shell an inch-and-a-half-thick. Their anatomy, like their appearance, is downright strange. They have teeth and a parrot-like mouth and feed mostly on jellyfish. They are largely inedible to humans and have few underwater predators.
Sharks are also in the news this summer, prowling the Gulf of Maine and scaring swimmers. This rare image shows a dead shark in front of the Appledore Hotel at the Isles of Shoals. It shares a wheelbarrow with what appears to be a large cod. We know nothing more about this Victorian photo, but there are hints in 19th century writings about the Isles of Shoals.
Poet Celia Thaxter wrote about "sand-sharks" as long as a boat with their tall fins jutting out of the water that frightened the local fishermen. Frequent Appledore Hotel visitor Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch took a trip to Smuttynose Island in 1853. Peering over the edge of the boat into the water at Haley’s Cove, according to his journal, he saw "horrid jaws, shark bones & occasionally huge dead bodies of immense sharks that have been killed & thrown as useless by the fishermen to be devoured by the perch that are growing plump & lively."
A year earlier in 1852, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spotted the dorsal fin of an 8- to 10-foot shark from his window at the Appledore Hotel. Oscar Laighton, Celia’s little brother (then age 13), fired his gun at the shark from the shore without result. According to Hawthorne, the shark "came so near the shore that he might have been touched with a boat-hook."
(Photo copyright Portsmouth Athenaeum Collection) "Historic Portsmouth" is presented every Thursday. J. Dennis Robinson is the author of books about Strawbery Banke Museum, Wentworth by the Sea Hotel, and the 1873 Smuttynose ax murders. His newest book, "Music Hall," was named best 2020 history book by the Independent Book Publishers Association, available online or at your local bookstore. This is weekly image number 845. You can contact Dennis at dennis@mySeacoastNH.com or please visit www.jdennisrobinson.com online.
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Historic Portsmouth: One Fish, Two Fish, Big Fish, Huge Fish - Foster's Daily Democrat
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