After getting the last tag deployed in August we had hoped for big things in September but it wasn’t to be. There were good reports of large Porbeagles off the Scottish coast but they just didn’t seem to be heading south to us, despite the good weather finally turning up. Thats fairly typical though and something you get used to when working in the Northeast Atlantic. It would be interesting to know what they were feeding on in Scottish waters though. We suspect it is probably Herring, which is a favourite of these sharks and the reason they are call the herring shark in many of the Nordic countries.

It is late in the season to be getting porbeagles as they usually disappear around September but the weather is fairly calm at the moment so it was worth a try. Finally success! Our angler peter landed a nice 50lb, 1.3m female. She was too small for a SPOT tag so we put a PAT tag on her and also a roto=tag (yellow tag in the picture). These roto-tags are part of the Marine Sport Fish Tagging Programme, which has been run by Inland Fisheries Ireland since the 1970’s. 

More reports to follow soon and hopefully some bigger ones will turn up too.