‘They are here’ – Expert insists great white sharks are now in Irish waters

The seal-rich waters around Ireland are prime hunting ground for great white sharks in late summer and autumn, one of the world’s most experienced shark explorers said this week.

‘To us, they have to be out there,’ Chris Fischer said this week from his home in Utah.

This gut feeling is why he is flying out to the Spanish port city of Vigo in the coming weeks to board his 126-foot shark-tagging vessel for the first leg of his expedition through Mediterranean waters before arriving on the Cork coast.

‘I’m flying over to meet the ship in Spain. Many think this is an impossible task and that white sharks aren’t located in the eastern North Atlantic waters off Ireland, France, and Spain, but dozens of fishermen sightings and stories say otherwise,’ said the captain, whose work has featured on CBS’s 60 minutes, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and National Geographic.

‘We feel like our best opportunity in the whole expedition is off the Irish coast, because we really get into the density of the seals up there. That’s why we’re coming.’

‘We’re arriving on the south coast down in Cork in September, and then rolling around into the Bantry Bay area, and then we’re working all the way up to the west coast and to the north coast. The planning started two years ago.

‘We’re going out for two weeks in Spain, two weeks in France, three and a half weeks in Ireland, and we’re hoping for just one chance at one fish.

‘That one fish will show us where all the rest of them live.’

Currently, he said, there is ‘almost no data’ on the presence of Mediterranean white sharks in Ireland. But he believes the conditions here are perfect for the apex predator.

The development comes after a pair of Galway fishermen shared a video of what they insist was a great white which had been circling their boat earlier this month.

Over the past 17 years, Mr Fischer has amassed a global knowledge of the world’s best-known shark through 46 ocean research expeditions from Nova Scotia to the western Cape of South Africa and Brazil where his team has tagged and released hundreds of the sharks.

‘We’ve gone into many places where they said there were no white sharks. When we went into the New York/New Jersey Bight to locate the birthing area, they said there were no white sharks there.’

‘We tagged 20,’ said the expedition leader, whose previous research efforts were chronicled on the History Channel series Shark Wranglers. ‘When we went to Canada, they told us there were no white sharks there. We tagged 34.’

‘No one has ever tagged a white shark in Europe, ever.’

Expedition Save The Med is searching mainly for the endangered great white sharks along with porbeagle and blue sharks.

A hydraulic platform on board the M/V Ocearch called a cradle hoists the shark above the water before the team attaches a satellite tag that precisely records their body movements, speed, and other metrics when the shark returns to the ocean.

Mr Fischer noted water temperatures around Ireland – which range from an average of 10°C off the southwest coast to 16°C – are not too cold for the white sharks which reach up to 20 feet long.

‘They really love that 15°C, 16°C degree water that is primetime right off the (Irish) coast. We see white sharks in temperatures down at 10°C, 12°C.’

His team are relying on their in-depth knowledge of tracking sharks around the planet over the past two decades.

Referring to the conditions in Irish waters, he added: ‘Based on where we see white sharks in other parts of the world, all the usual suspects are there, all the other critters that are supposed to be there, the water temperatures.’

‘The expedition leader has his own theories about why the giant creatures haven’t been officially spotted here. They’re always trying to be invisible so that they can ambush their prey.’

But sometimes, he added, people simply don’t – or won’t – believe their own eyes.

Because people told them once there were no white sharks there, and then they see a white shark, and they’re like: ‘Oh, look it’s a mako, it’s a basking shark.’

‘We won’t actually prove there’s one there until there’s one captured, tagged and tracked there but I’m just telling you guys what we’re leaning on.’

Mr Fischer began his life on the ocean making big game fishing shows for ESPN Outdoors called Offshore Adventures. While making the series, the team started taking the scientists out on the water with them.

‘We began to just explode the amount of data they could collect,’ he said.

The research was borne out of marrying his team of ‘professional world water men’ with scientists to solve the puzzle of shark movements around the globe.

‘It’s very easy for my guys to catch giant white sharks and put them in the cradle,’ he said, adding that the crew were not experts at writing papers, but their shark tracking skills are invaluable to scientists.

Throwing chum – chunks of fish meat with bone and blood – in the water is not their method of tracking the predators.

‘It’s effective for, I don’t know, 15 metres, 10 metres,’ he said. ‘The whole movie thing of chum and sharks from miles and miles away is all fake.’

When it comes to movies, he said the fear generated by movies like Jaws is an initial reaction to the presence of sharks when they have previously been located for the first time off the east coast of the US and Canada.

And if he does tag a shark in Irish water, he is hoping to livestream the event and is running a sweepstake competition to allow a winner to meet a white shark on the expedition. Mr Fischer also has personal reasons for coming to Ireland – he has fond memories of a family vacation to visit his Irish relatives a few years ago.