Episode 2 Monty Halls' Great Irish Escape

A wild ocean teeming with life,

the sun in the sky and a crazy dog for company.

Rubes!

Just another day at the office.

This is the coast of Connemara in the west of Ireland.

Some of the largest animals on the planet

migrate through these waters...

That was moderately close.

And on land, the people are a special breed too.

Whoo!

For the next six months I'm going back to my roots

as a marine biologist,

working for a whale and dolphin conservation group.

You don't want to burst the intestines

-cos it gets very messy then.

-Yeah. AIR ESCAPING

It's the chance of a lifetime

to discover more about the extraordinary animals

swimming off our shores.

And it's great fun, did I mention it was great fun?

Whoo hoo hoo!

Fantastic!

This week my mission is to hunt down basking sharks,

true monsters of the deep.

I seriously thought he was going to eat me.

And the wildlife attacks just go on...

Ooh!

..and on.

One of the slight downsides of swimming with Rubes

is that he just wants to rescue me,

and then every now and then he catches me a good 'un.

Attacked by my own dog.

An inevitable part of my job here for the six months

is going to be ranging up and down the west coast,

so I do lots of road trips, basically.

Just bolting the RIB on the back and heading off

and this one's down to see Simon in Kilrush.

Simon's my boss at the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group

and he wants me to find out as much as I can about a monster fish that visits this coast.

We don't know much about dolphins, we know absolutely nothing about basking sharks,

you know, simple stuff.

I mean, even the physiology, the gestation period,

all this kind of stuff.

Basking sharks are massive.

The biggest one ever recorded was longer than a double decker bus

and all from a diet of microscopic plankton.

They appear off our shores every summer,

but we've very little idea where they go for the rest of the time.

'Is the basking shark in trouble, is it endangered?

'It's vulnerable according to CITES.'

It was hunted extensively,

its populations are thought to be depleted because of that

and the geneticists tell us the population could be as less

-as 20,000 individuals in the whole world, you know...

-Wow.

which I find hard to believe. But in Ireland we've actually,

the last two or three years, we've reported an increase in sightings.

Yeah.

So is that because there's more on the surface,

is there more here, what's going on?

I've dug out some shark tags for you, at long last.

These are tags we had made for us last year,

for the Basking Shark Project.

I had these made, well, a similar type made for me in 1993,

when I tried to start tagging sharks and I failed miserably,

and it took me 15 years before I got a tag out and that was only 2008.

That's amazing, that the first ever sharks,

basking sharks, tagged here was just two years ago.

-And a fifth, after 15 years of trying to do it.

-Yeah.

If it took Simon 15 years to tag his first basker,

what hope for me in one summer?

Subtlety doesn't work, straight in, bang it in

and most of the time the shark, it might kind of flinch because it's shocked with the bolt,

I don't think it feels the tag going in

and occasionally there's a smack of the tail

and a cloud of water comes over you.

The tags are a simple way of tracking where the basking sharks travel in the oceans,

but last year Simon stumbled on a much more sophisticated research technique.

It was when we tagged one shark,

it kind of banged off the side of the boat with its tail fin.

We were back at Malin Head harbour at the end of the day

and I saw black slime on the front of the boat

and I remembered when I was out fishing with gill netters,

they'd say that they know when a shark's bust their net cos it's covered in slime.

I was thinking it must have been from the shark.

So I put it in a tube, sent it to the geneticist

and said see if you can get any DNA from that and they could,

which was fantastic because there was literally, up to last year,

before we started sliming, there was less than 100 samples of basking sharks' genetics in the world.

-(Good grief.)

-Mad, isn't it?

We're the only shark slime samplers on the planet.

Welcome, welcome to the world of shark sliming!

I am 25% of the shark science slime samplers on the planet.

As you said, harder to say, easier to do!

Well, that's brilliant, Simon, thank you so much!

This is the kit required for smearing a basking shark,

an alarming concept, I'm sure you agree.

The whole idea is that these are pan scourers, obviously,

and the slime will be held in the little cells of this pad, this scouring pad,

and in the slime is the genetic make-up of that animal.

So, its populations, its history, it's all in the slime.

Erm, and then I'll freeze that and get it to the Galway Institute.

Stage one, remove the head of your mop.

This only just kind of came to me when I went past a hardware store

and Simon of course, Simon advised me, as well,

that scouring pads are the ideal thing.

Stage two, is fix your scouring pad,

in fact, d'you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to fix two.

Don't for a moment make the mistake of thinking I know what I'm doing.

This is all new stuff. Now that'll do,

literally just needs to be brushed along the back of the animal.

Stage three, is going to find a basking shark.

'I need to sample baskers, hopefully,

'and to do so I've got to get really close to them

'and I've got to rub the old pan scrubber thing on 'em.'

I want to practise doing that

and the best way to do it is from the kayak, a sea kayak.

You get really close to animals in a kayak cos you're low, you're quiet and don't alarm them.

-But I need to practice on a large marine organism,

-REUBEN BARKING

just to give it a go and see if I can actually...

And that noise you can hear

is the large marine organism I'm going to try it out on.

An afternoon alive with possibilities.

Perfect, a perfect sample.

'I've had a little settling-in period now

'and a good old chat to Simon'

and I've got a very good idea of what I need to do here,

so what I need to do now is just get out there and get on with it.

'Simon knows, actually, quite little about this region

'because relatively little information has been gathered.'

I think, I've got a sneaky suspicion,

that Connemara is one of the richest places in Europe

for big animals in the sea

and I'm going to make it my mission over the next few months

to prove that that's an absolute fact.

'Look at that.'

We certainly know there were so many basking sharks in the past

that hunting them was a way of life.

Basking shark fisheries extracted a terrible toll on the basking shark.

It's estimated about 100,000 were taken in Norway, and in Scotland,

and in Ireland,

and the last one to shut in Ireland was Achill Island.

'These huge sea cliffs, highest sea cliffs in Europe,

'which is interesting in terms of the baskers

'because they tend to like areas like that.'

They like these big drop-offs

and where big currents come up against something hard, like a big cliff

cos you get nutrients there and lots of currents. Nice bridge.

And I'm just heading down there now

to meet someone who was involved in the basking shark fishery

'and just find out a little bit more about it

'and what it was like to hunt these massive,

'massive animals in the sea.'

Michael Gielty is taking me to Keane Bay where the hunts used to happen.

-Left, right?

-Take a right here.

-Take a right, no problem.

-Wow, that is really something!

-That a lovely inlet, that is.

Really something.

I come back here nearly every day and maybe read the paper,

-just have a look.

-Ah, lovely.

-It's nicest of all when you're on your own, the only one there.

-Absolutely.

Well, what a spot.

-Got a very excited dog in the back. He likes his beaches.

-Does he?

Ooh yeah!

Michael and his mates would have headed out to the Atlantic waters on the traditional currach boat.

Its Gaelic meaning is "unstable" and it's well named.

The biggest danger was being sort of thrown, thrown out of the currach.

And could you swim then? Were you a good swimmer?

-No, couldn't swim.

-Good grief!

And of the many men who have been fishing here, probably up to 40,

-and I'd say there was maybe a third of them swimmers.

-Really?

Many of the old-time fishermen never learned to swim

because they believed if their fate was to drown, then so be it.

And how were the sharks caught?

The sharks were coming out from left to right.

We went along and we put irons, or chains,

or whatever in the rock to hold the net

and we shot the net across from right to left.

So the net was across the sort of end of the bay, there.

Yeah, then at the end of the net we'd a small stone,

maybe about a pound weight, to hold the net in position.

-Right, right.

-And then the shark came along

and he'd go into the middle of the net and the shore was tight,

the shore-up was tight,

but the other one, as he was going along, it was moving in behind him.

So, so here we were here in the currach,

the spears man was this side,

this man's job was to hold the net across the stern of the currach

and here we were here, harpooning the shark

and if you didn't have patience,

if you didn't get him right with the first shot, he'd play hell.

It'd take you maybe 15, 20 minutes to get him.

It was only the shark's liver they were after,

the oil of which lit the street lamps of Ireland.

The carcasses were left to rot on the sea bed.

When you look back on it,

how do you feel about killing the sharks now, is it...

Oh, I'm dead sorry.

-Oh, really?

-Yeah.

To us it was, it was, you got,

you got to work for three months of the year, at home, you know?

Most of the lads would come back from England for the shark fishing

and have the three months at home with their wives and family.

You know the poor fellas, they're doing no-one any harm

and they only live on plankton and...

But, but, you see, we fished way back in the '50s,

we, we never thought fish would get scarce.

We always thought there was plenty there for every...

And there was then, with our type of fishing,

And then when the bigger fellas came along.

Michael, everyone talks to me about the slime, the black slime.

-Oh, yeah.

-Can you tell me anything about that?

I'm trying to think of it, there's a certain time of year the slime,

when they were, when they were mating,

that was the most time with the slime,

and then, and when you get it on the nets.

-Yeah.

-You know, yeah, yeah.

'It's a beautiful tranquil spot behind me,'

but it was a scene of carnage and chaos and drama

in the '50s, when Michael was, was doing his fishing.

Michael said some interesting things about the slime.

If there was slime, other sharks would be drawn towards that slime.

Who knows? It's all speculation.

That's the great thing about these animals

and about working here this summer is that so much of it's speculation and uncharted territory,

which is an amazing thing when you consider this is one of the giants of the ocean

that visits our shore every year at the same time.

While I'm here I thought it'd be nice to have some home-grown food.

The veggies have been growing fantastically well,

I've surprised myself.

And they're getting too big for their boxes now.

The plan is to have, kind of, hillocks of soil

running right the way down the hill.

I've got long enough here to actually grow a few veg

and really start learning about the shore here

and start getting the food from the shore and the sea

and by the end hopefully be kind of self-sufficient.

You know, be getting a lot of my food from here and from out there.

Here we go.

I'm going to have to build a fence around this as well,

cos the one thing we do have here in abundance is hares.

Hares are very rare,

or increasingly rare in Britain,

and the reason is that they're all over here!

There's some net down there, some old fishing net,

which I'll make a fence with.

Get some driftwood, some fishing net,

I mean, come on, start of a bit of a fence.

It's a, sort of, a hare-shaped hole, isn't it?

That's good.

I'll come out in the morning and find hundreds of hares caught in the net.

Or Rubes, I'll find Rubes, like that...

..struggling in the net! Come on.

Perfect.

Pull it tight. All this fence has got to do is keep some hares out.

It's a HARE net!

Now I'm planting quite late,

so I've abandoned my plans to do bananas, avocado and coffee

and instead I'm doing things like the salad.

Any digging needs to be closely supervised.

It's not a bad day's work, that's not a bad day's work, is it?

Oh, God! I've realised why I don't garden now,

it's ABSOLUTELY shattering!

Right Rubes, be aware of the terrible implications

of you pogo-ing all over my new vegetable patch I've slaved all afternoon to create.

I'm serious!

This is serious horticulture.

HE GASPS

Rubes! This isn't helping, is it? Rubes!

Does anyone else's dog do this?

Oi!

Not on the fence, you berk!

The reef's just off my front door, out of my front door,

you walk 150 yards and you've got amazing reefs

and they're, sort of, pushing into white sand, areas of white sand,

and it's perfect crab and lobster country.

I'm hoping to catch a few fish while I'm here

and the reefs are teeming with crabs and lobsters.

'Just going to put out the first of my pots.

'Martin's going to come out and show me where to put 'em.

'Ideally somewhere that isn't going to get me beaten up in the pub!

'Yeah!'

Martin O'Malley is a fisherman and powerboat instructor

who's keeping me right while I learn the local waters.

Well, let's say...

-Close to your house, in that kind of area there.

-Yeah, yeah, I'm with you.

So, you're saying right along the edge?

-Yeah, if we bait it up first, maybe.

-Ah yes.

-Is this the...?

Those are the fish. We thought brown trout would work well.

-Ah yeah, bit of salmon?

-Yeah, that's right!

Oh.

What they ARE trout? You're joking!

Oh, I know where that's from.

Now I should point out, by the way, there's a local girl who's helping me out

and cos I was charging around this morning putting the boat in I said,

"Oh, can you nip and get some fish from the fishmonger,"

and she very kindly did.

She's come back with smoked herring I think it is, which is very nice,

so my creels'll be very distinctive along these coasts!

-What's that, herring?

-I think it's smoked herring, yeah.

-Yeah.

Which is delicious.

It is, yeah. It's a shame to see it going in the pot.

It'll probably last about a minute in the pot, as well.

-Big ug... a big ugly crab hanging out of it.

-Gorgeous.

Why go through all the rigmarole of catching a crab

-when you can eat the bait? That's my theory.

-Indeed.

-OK, is that one baited?

-That one's baited, yeah.

-Just here?

-Yeah.

And we'll do one more.

There it goes.

I shall be fascinated to see what we catch.

Usually they're left two or three days.

You can haul them every day if you want, or if you want,

but the, the chances aren't nearly as good.

Oh, I think I'll, I'll give it a couple of days

cos the other thing I'm worried about is cos it's smoked fish,

-it'll probably degrade...

-Easier.

-Yeah.

-Quicker.

Yeah, you're better off giving it a couple,

-two, two, three days.

-Yeah, no problem.

One of the key things to do over the course of the next few weeks,

or indeed the next few days,

is to get posters up in Clifden, in, just generally all around Connemara.

To try and get people to give me a call

when they sight a big animal in the sea.

No-one's better than the local fishermen at doing this,

or the local divers, or the people who get out regularly on the sea,

the guys who run the ferries.

That is what the fuss is all about.

There we are, the second largest fish in the sea,

it's filter feeding.

It's worth getting excited about, I think, something like that,

so I'll stick that on the poster and catch people's eye, hopefully,

and catch their attention and give them a big old number to phone

and just wait for the phone to ring.

Even if you don't get out there yourself,

you can still record the sighting,

you can still say, right, someone said they saw a basking shark in this location,

then you build up a pattern of the movement of the animals around the coast.

This is the extremely appropriately named Bog Road...

on a bleak day.

It's been really honking, this mizzle coming in from the Atlantic.

But what it does mean is it's a bit blowy,

so all the boats are tied up alongside

and it's a great opportunity to go and give the posters to fishermen,

to hotels, to pubs.

I'm meeting someone called John Brittain

and he's with the RNLI in Clifden,

so he is a good man to ask about basking sharks, I think.

Hello John,

how are you?

The traditional wee against the,

I'll do that in a moment, it's like...

-Rubes, come here.

-Come and have a look at the station.

-Yes.

-This is the, the station we keep the ILB1 in.

Right.

I always think anywhere I ever operate,

you know, tagging programmes or anything like that,

it's always worth sticking your head around the RNLI place

and just sort of saying hello and...

Seeing what's in there, in case you need anything, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Could I give you a couple of posters?

-A number for people to call if they see a basker, or whatever.

-Absolutely.

I haven't seen any recently, except for the, the bottle-nosed dolphins.

-Yeah.

-Are you going to try and tag these?

-Yes.

Yeah, cos you do the blue shark tagging as well, don't you?

I do, yeah, the sharks, that's a very basic form of tagging,

it's a plastic tag with a number on it and an address,

"Send it back to the Fisheries Board in Ireland if you find this."

The best one I had was, recapture, was down off the Cape Verde Islands,

-which I think is about 3,500 miles from here.

-Yeah, yeah.

All right, John, well, I'm going to keep charging round

and dishing these out, so...

-Well, I'll ring you if I see one.

-Yeah, oh, please do.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Yeah, yeah, that'll be fantastic.

-I will, indeed, yeah.

'I'm just wondering, I've got some posters'

-and I was wondering if I could give you a couple to put up.

-No problem.

-Fantastic, thank you.

I was just wondering if I could put up a couple of posters. That's very kind, thanks.

Horrible home-made affairs, but just if anyone you know who might see a basking shark...

'Was it a big one?'

-Yeah?

-Quite big.

Fantastic.

Gone in for a quiet beer and you come out at quarter to one!

But a really, really good evening

and the lads are really up for it, as is so often the case.

Fishermen in places like Roundstone are very hooked into the local environment

and are very interested in the animals they're seeing

and trying to help out in understanding them a little bit more,

so really promising that and a great evening, thoroughly enjoyed myself.

'Chatting to a lot of the guys in Connemara,'

they say that one place that's very good for basking sharks is the Aran Islands.

I brought the RIB down, it's my first visit to the Aran Islands,

this mythical set of islands,

and I'm just going to have a little cruise along the cliffs,

that's the Arans,

basking shark central.

The Arans are three remote islands in the Atlantic.

Inis Mor is Big Island,

Inis Meain is Middle Island

and Inis Oirr is East Island.

'Oh, look at that.'

I'm going to take a trip round to the cliffs

on the western shore of the main island.

That's apparently where all the baskers are seen.

The problem I've got is seeing a basker in this is going to be really, really tricky.

Well, this is it, this is the western side of Inis Mor,

the largest of the Aran islands.

If you look at these cliffs, they just face,

they're a buttress between the islands and the open Atlantic.

We talk about Fortress Europe...

Well, these are the castle walls

and they've been sculpted and shaped over aeons of time

into these really rugged caves and cliffs.

Really beautiful, really beautiful

and a fitting setting for something like a basking shark,

or a minke whale, or a humpback.

You know, fairly regular visitors to these waters. So let's see.

Something going on ahead of me here with the birds.

A lot of birds feeding, lots of activity.

If all this is going on above the surface,

you can guarantee there'll be something going on underneath as well.

But of course it's trying to figure out what it is.

The waves look intimidatingly massive through my binoculars, I must say.

The basking sharks are here somewhere,

but I'm beginning to worry it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

All I can do is keep hoping and patrolling.

I'm trying to find a pinnacle, there's an undersea pinnacle.

Great places for fishing.

I marked it when I was out here on patrol one day.

Here we go, there it is.

Let's see.

Comes from about 70 feet of water up to about 40 feet, looks exciting.

It's an underwater volcano spewing out fish. I'm convinced.

There should be very happy hunting grounds.

I've just seen this MASSIVE reef underneath me.

Oh-ho-ho-ha! Now that's...

SPINNING REEL

Woo! There you are, a beautiful pollock.

Look at that.

These guys are SO successful down there,

they're the wolves of the reef.

Probably THE most successful reef predator in Britain.

I think the pollock, really nice-looking fish.

I'll keep this guy and stick him in my creels

and then hopefully he'll bring in some crabs and lobsters.

I'm not optimistic about the creels, partly cos they're baited with trout and smoked herring.

I do want to get

a bit more serious about all this

and start really trying to provide myself with some good food.

Nothing in it. It's absolutely empty so I'm going to re-bait it.

I've sort of been playing at it, up to this point...

..but...it'll be nice to start...

feeding myself.

Check the other ones.

And actually getting reasonably self-sufficient.

Now, I'm obviously never going to be totally self-sufficient,

there's things like milk and stuff I have to buy,

but just a level of self-sufficiency would be splendid.

Well, there we go, they're out fishing for me now

and with any luck get a couple of crabs, maybe even a lobster or two

and I'll get some people round when I've smoked some fish as well

and have a really nice get-together, big old cook-up.

Need to get in now, the wind's sprung up so much it's unbelievable.

A big part of my job is responding to calls about whales and dolphins

that have been washed ashore, dead or alive.

Often there's nothing there by the time I arrive, but I have to check out every report.

I've towed my RIB 3,000 miles up and down the coast of Ireland,

chasing shadows.

But I'm just off to Cleggan,

to meet up with Martin O'Malley, John Brittain,

these are great guys to get out on the boat with,

a huge well of local knowledge

and the first problem they can sort out with that knowledge

is the fact that the RIB has just bounced on the trailer

and is leaning drunkenly at a very worrying angle

and it always ends up rubbing against the metal of the trailer,

which is not very good for RIBs.

Cos if I lose the RIB I'm stuffed, you know.

I can't get out on the water, I can't do the photo IDs,

I can't do the tagging,

and all this towing is really tearing the thing apart.

It's tearing me apart as well. I'm knackered.

I want a cappuccino...

and a sofa and a flat screen, that's all I want.

And my mum.

John and Martin already feel like old mates, ready to help out whenever I call.

-You were adjusting the boat?

-We were, we were, I was sort of...

-Round here that means the boat fell off the trailer!

-Yes,

I was inadvertently, the road was adjusting the boat.

The problem is that, you know where the, like, rubber nose wheel is,

-on the trailer that you put the bow on?

-Hm.

It's bounced and, and was rubbing on the thing,

so I was just wondering if you could have a quick look at the hull and just see if...

I'll show you, it was just here, and I'll just lift it.

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

-Is there anything on that side, is there?

-Just a little bit.

-Yeah, on this side it seems to be, look.

-A bit on both sides.

-Oh, it's on both sides.

-Yeah.

It's funny, you do more damage to boats trailering them around, don't you?

It's difficult to get a nice finish on a bonding. Somebody else will do that.

OK. Nip round the other side.

Great stuff. Look at that.

-You can barely notice the repair.

-No.

I mean other than it's a different colour, you wouldn't be able to see it, would you!

And I'll probably hang on to this

cos I suspect I'll be using it again, there we go.

I think the plan'll be to, to get the old girl in for a...

a bit of TLC cos she's been battered over the last few weeks.

Come on then, Rubes.

Now although it's a beautiful, beautiful day

I do feel a slight sense of frustration.

It's nice to be doing this but even though it's kind of a day off,

I would be out there like a shot, patrolling for whales and dolphins and baskers

but sadly my RIB is temporarily out of service

cos it's just been knocked about so much over the last couple of months.

But hopefully I'll pick it up again pretty soon and we can get back out there,

cos look at that - these are the optimum conditions for looking for these animals.

It's flat calm, you see the ripples a long way off, you see the sun glinting off dorsal fins.

Just perfect, and I'm off collecting winkles.

Rubes.

Oh, this is great! Get a few of these winkles.

Ah, Rubes!

I should be out tagging five-ton sharks.

Yeah, this is the winkle,

Littorina spp,

and they have a very interesting sex life, these animals.

They change sex sometimes...

and they have this thing of the...

male winkle's winkle dropping off...

..which is alarming in the extreme, I imagine,

and then grows back next year. They've got this operculum here.

It's a trap door they shut when the tide goes out

and they stay nice and moist and safe inside.

We can see this guy's coming out, cos it's high tide

so he's been very active. He's just popped his head out and that's the part I'm going to eat.

I was going to go for a swim,

the water is about...14 degrees.

Fancy that, Rubes, fancy a swim?

One of the slight downsides of swimming with Rubes

is he just wants to rescue me, he just wants get me out of the water,

you know, and he does it by trying to grab me, grab me with his claws

and pull me round and every now and then he catches me a good 'un.

He's caught me an absolute humdinger there.

Attacked by my own dog.

Great, isn't it? I go foraging for a few winkles

and I come back cold, wet and bleeding.

Tiny little bit of lettuce here,

assuming Rubes doesn't try and rescue me.

Going to be a feast fit for a king, this, isn't it?

Come on, Rubes, you big bully.

A lovely way to cook these is white wine and herbs.

Unfortunately I haven't got any white wine,

so I'm just going to put a bit of water, a bit of vinegar

and a few of the herbs from the garden, and lemon, pepper.

I'm the Blumenthal of Connemara.

Interestingly, when they used to cook shellfish

on the coast here, back in the mists of time,

and I'm talking a long time ago, they didn't have cooking pots that could withstand fire,

so what they'd do is put stones in a fire and then make a depression

in the earth and put the stone... put water in the depression

and then put the stones in.

So an awful lot of places you walk round here

have blackened stones.

And then if you look nearby wherever there's a load of blackened stones,

you'll invariably find a bunch of old shells,

shells that are hundreds and hundreds of years old.

Have I got any tomatoes in here?

These are tomatoes from the supermarket down the road

but, with any luck, I'll have my own tomatoes by the end of the summer.

Smells all right.

That's what the fuss is all about, there we go.

Mm, honestly...

that was really nice.

Quite a delicate flavour, actually.

It's not a sort of...

I was expecting a really strong flavour and it's not at all.

That is really, really nice.

Great food and great fun.

It's a good combo.

The boat's still out of action but I need to check my lobster creels.

So I'm going to go out in the kayak and, er...be rather clever

and try and tie a rope around the buoy which is just there

and, with any luck, be able to tow that in and stand on the rock

and haul the creel in and there's another one up here somewhere.

So it's going to be, watch this space, this could be quite funny.

Well, I started...

about an hour and a half ago.

Finally we've made it ashore,

but I got a little glance at the creel and it's been opened.

Which is quite interesting cos it's either a local fisherman

who's not happy that my creels are out here -

I asked everyone in the village and got permission and borrowed these creels from a local fisherman -

or, believe it or not, it could be an otter.

Otters have learned to open creels and mine are in shallow water.

There's definitely otters around here, I've seen spraints,

I've seen bits of old crab claws,

so the otter has got the better of me this time. I hope it's an otter

and not a local person cos I'd be mortified if a local guy was upset that I was fishing here.

So somewhere on a rock, behind a rock somewhere,

there's an otter having a good laugh.

There we are, one opened creel.

So, not good.

Not good. Now I've got one more I'm going to go and check,

just to see if that's been opened as well and, if that's the case,

I'll go to the pub and make sure there isn't anyone who's upset

and, if it's a small guy, I'll have it out with him,

if it's a big guy, I'll buy him a beer and apologise.

Don't go away.

There's something in my creel.

This is a spider crab, Maja squinado, which means May and angles.

May because they appear in May,

they have mating aggregations in May and come to shallow water to breed.

These guys camouflage themselves.

They put bits of seaweed and whatever, they stick 'em on to themselves,

like a soldier with a helmet with all the stuff stuffed in it, and there's beautiful colour underneath.

They're not really nippers, they've got this wonderful armoured shell

with all these points on and that's a really small one.

I could put that on a cracker, possibly, but I'm not,

I'm going to put him back and I'll go and have a cheese sandwich.

But lifting that second one was really important

because I was really worried that,

you know, maybe, as I said, some local was upset or whatever

that I was using the pots here and the fact that the pot was shut and had this crab in it is a good sign.

So I'm really happy about that and I think that the other one might have been an otter.

There's so much otter activity along here and the otters open creels,

the locals have told me about it, so there we go. I'll pop him back.

Right, chap, off you go and grow a lot bigger. See you next May.

Come on out, Rubes - you'll get squashed.

Take a look at this.

That's a spider crab shell that's been, probably...

Rubes is helping me.

That's a spider crab shell that has probably been eaten by an otter.

It's a bit smashed up. I find a lot of them as I walk the dog along here in the morning, find a lot of these.

I'm absolutely confident there's an otter working this little stretch,

so, obviously, I'll have a look for him later on.

It adds to my theory that maybe the pot was opened by an otter.

So there we go, evidence, exhibit A.

My association with places like this - wild places, where the mountains hit the sea

and there's lochs and bays and inlets and incredible wildlife - started with one animal.

It started with an animal I was fascinated with as a kid

and I've got an opportunity to meet that animal now in a pretty unique environment,

and get closer to it than I think I probably ever will for the rest of my life.

Judy and Clive Lawrence run an animal sanctuary at Letterfrack, 20 miles from my cottage,

and their latest arrival is an orphan otter.

Hello, young lady.

This is obviously the closest I've ever been to an otter

and this animal is the animal that drew me to the west coast of Scotland originally

because of the works of Gavin Maxwell and he raised the otters Midge and Edal

and he spoke of the fact that you could kind of domesticate an otter,

but it would always be a wild animal

and you can just see by the look in the otter's eye here that...

D'you want to give her a prawn now?

Oh, yes, please. I might have one myself.

There you go, young lady.

The teeth are obviously fearsomely sharp.

Maxwell wrote of having his hand bitten once

and the teeth actually met through his hand.

So it's a top predator, it's not an animal to be messed with.

The whole thing Judy and Clive are trying to do here

is gradually distance themselves from the otter

so the otter can be released.

Mind your fingers.

I'm very much minding my fingers.

OTTER SPITS AND HISSES

-Oi!

-Oh. Yeah.

Now that's just the slight whiff of Reuben.

I'm assuming it's the slight whiff of Reuben,

it might be me! If ever my trousers proved their worth...

it's having... Oh, there we go.

Look at that!

The other thing you notice straight away, being this close, is the design.

You can see this is an animal designed to move through water,

very sinuous, almost eel-like.

And that flat head and very bright, very intelligent eyes.

And again, Maxwell always talked of this, it's really intelligent.

This is a magical, magical moment for me to be... It's an animal

I've seen in the distance, it's assumed almost mystical proportions for me

and to be this close to one is unbelievable.

She needs at least 20% of her body weight per day in food,

so that's a kilo of food she needs every day.

So you can imagine in the wild, you know,

that's a ferocious rate of predation, isn't it?

Yeah. But they're burning up their food so quickly.

Yeah. Right, could be time for me to leave, I think.

Right, Monty, ready.

I'm, er...

..with bruised ankles.

That was a relief to get out, was it?

No, that was amazing, amazing.

Look at that, she's enjoying that.

An amazing experience and it didn't disappoint me at all.

It's like meeting a superstar, someone you've always wanted to meet

and, often, that can be quite a crushing experience.

I've always wanted to get that close to an otter

and just see what made this animal so special and it wasn't...

It's a ball of energy. It's like bottling lightning, meeting an otter,

er, and real intelligence and amazing athleticism

and seeing it so close, the way it moved in the water.

It was just absolutely beautiful.

I've just had a very excited and very exciting phone call.

The excited part was a guy standing on a headland,

telling me he was looking at 24 basking sharks.

What would you call that? A fleet.

Not a shoal. It'd be a fleet of basking sharks.

The only slight snag is that it's Malin Head that he was standing on,

which is the very northernmost tip of Ireland.

The exciting part for me is obviously this is an opportunity

to tag and possibly get in the water

with a large number of huge marine animals.

I'm meeting here a guy called Emmet. Emmet is the one who made the call and said he could see the baskers.

He's a man who should know cos he's the local wildlife ranger.

-The slipway's down here so.

-No problem.

'Emmet Johnson has worked in Malin Head for the past six years.'

Once you get up past that headland up there, you're into shark country.

Right, excellent.

There's flat calm, oily calm,

conditions are perfect. Emmet saying they've been seen all day.

Seven o'clock at night now, so we've got about an hour, maybe, to have a little look round.

They were here an hour ago.

You're talking about the sort of dark things that's gone just below the horizon.

-Could be, could be, yeah.

-Yeah. I'm making the classic mistake

of staring fixedly at exactly where you're staring.

Not the most efficient way of searching!

-Well, they're up and down. They're not staying on the surface at the moment.

-Yeah.

I thought I just saw something about 150 metres off the boat.

Yes, you can just knock her back if you just want to sit and...

Something definitely out there.

See there? There, that's a fin, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there she is, there she is. 100%, that is a basking shark.

That little glimpse of fin

makes the whole six-hour drive, getting the boat in, worthwhile.

Tag number 74 55 18 29 north.

You can see why it's a sight that has raised people's emotions.

7-3-2-9-5 west, time is 7:20.

Just go in for it, like, just... Don't go too fast.

Bring him round.

Knock her back, knock her back.

-Aw, sorry.

-Didn't go in. No, no, it's all right.

They're out here anyway, so that was nice to see the nose.

That was right out of the water, wasn't it?

Just there, just there.

OK.

There's one in front of you, as well.

There's one closer. Whoa, there's one just there.

Right, this is my last go and then you're up.

-Just sit there, let them come.

-Yeah.

-Go in, go in.

-Yeah.

Go, go, go.

Go, go, go!

Yeah, it's tagged, yeah.

-Well done, well done. First one.

-My debut tag, my debut tag.

Tag 0-7 at 5-5-1-8-0-7.

Feel the power of that animal.

You know, you've got a four or five metre shark,

you're probably talking a couple of tons, two and a half, three maybe.

And it gave the boat a clunk as it disappeared,

and the whole boat you could feel, bump, just shook in the water.

But that's great, that's another tag deployed

And the information from that tag if it's re-sighted will be invaluable

to tell the movements of that shark.

Indeed, the movements of the whole species off the coast of Ireland.

So, great stuff.

Right, this one's for you. Right behind you, do you see him?

Oh, fantastic, yeah, he's a beast.

Who could possibly miss an animal like that?

This is probably the most exciting moment of my entire miserable life.

-Too fast for you?

-Yeah, I didn't even see him.

Sorry, I'm too fast for you. Just there, on your right-hand side.

Got him.

-He's gone down, has he?

-Yeah, I think so, yeah.

We'll get a balance between the two of them.

You've got to just give a little bit of throttle,

kind of boost in before he can go down because...

-This is the one, I've got a good feeling about this.

-It's got your name on it.

It's actually good to see them high out of the water.

And see the nose, cos that means they're feeding.

While they're feeding they're preoccupied,

so we can get the tag in 'em.

OK.

-Oh!

-Are you OK? Did it go in?

There we are, got him.

The most clumsy, ham-fisted attempt. The poor animal.

But it definitely went in, I saw the tag go in, hopefully it stayed in.

Fantastic. And he gave the boat a big old clunk as he disappeared.

Great. My first-ever tag.

I'm going to go and get drunk.

-That was fantastic.

-Sorry, I should have...

-Oh, no! No, right.

-It's just, I wanted to be sure.

Yeah, spot on. Thanks, mate. Well done, well done.

The morning after the day before.

And it's 6:45 in the morning after the day before,

so nice and early. But just a phenomenal day yesterday.

-Were we here yesterday?

-Yeah, that's right.

Today we'll probably work the sharks a bit slower.

Make sure we've got our photographs on both sides of the fins,

and then maybe get a slime sample.

And then we'll go for the tag then as a last thing.

So we'll kind of build up a little portfolio

-to show the identity of the shark.

-Yes, absolutely.

Right.

Shark.

Oh, well spotted, well spotted.

Emmet has this near-supernatural ability to spot

that much of a basking shark popping up a mile and a half away.

-There's two there.

-Oh, God, there's three. One, two, three.

That moving in circles thing, it's a feeding thing.

He's coming back on himself,

it's like he's swimming in a bowl of soup, a small bowl of soup.

So he's turning all the time.

You can see his nose and that means he's got that massive mouth open.

It's called ram filter-feeding, this.

So he's pushing his body through the surface,

mouth open, and a huge amount of water's washing over his gill rakers,

and the gill rakers are sieving out the food.

-Now, see how easy you could have tagged him.

-Yeah!

We've got one, two, three, four, five sharks

that I can see in the area of a football pitch.

Seems to be going down and coming up, so it's hard to tell

how many there is at any one time.

Well, fishermen everywhere always say

-for every one on the surface there's at least two underneath.

-Yeah.

So I'm sitting over... Well, we're sitting over the top of considerable tonnage of animals at the moment.

-Pick a beast, then.

-I think he wants to be tagged, this one.

He's swimming right towards us.

Too fast, I think.

-Did you get him?

-Bang on. Bang on.

Only a fool could have missed.

My whole vision was just full of basking shark.

So...fantastic, that was seamless.

-Yeah, nose to tail.

-See him?

-In fact there's three.

-Is there three?

-Yeah, it is three, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Look at that, right in a really tight group, they must almost be touching.

There's so many mysteries surrounding this animal.

There's far more questions than answers.

-Circle back.

-Amazing, by the way.

It's like having dinosaurs round the boat. I could slime him.

Look, there we are. Just right here.

Well, I kind of scraped it down his back. Yes.

So this is the slime - the information that can be got from it

potentially is absolutely massive

And it's a bit like a memory stick, that slime.

And what we've got to do is somehow plug it in and decipher it,

and get the information out of it, because in there is potentially

the lineage of these animals, of that particular animal.

And this slime, it's like a book.

And if we can figure out how to read that book,

suddenly the story will reveal itself.

So I'm going to put it in a placcy bag and send it off to the labs

at Galway Marine Institute, and hopefully they can decipher it

and we'll find out a little bit more about the basking shark.

-Cutting edge science.

-Cutting edge science!

An oven scraper and some slime in there as well.

'Scientists will need hundreds more scouring pads

'before they can draw any conclusions,

'but I'm proud to be a pioneer slimer.'

We've tagged an animal,

we've taken photographs from the surface, we've got a slime sample.

And the next thing is to try and get the sex of the animal

that we've taken the slime sample from.

The only way to do that is get in the water

and try and get a shot underneath because the male has big claspers, pretty unmistakable.

You get a sense of scale there.

You can just see his snorkel and his head in the water.

The size even just of the fin, all we're seeing is the fin on the back of the shark.

Absolutely incredible.

Wow. Unbelievable.

I seriously thought he was going to eat me,

for just a brief second.

I had to fin furiously to get out of the way.

He came right at me.

I'm sure he had a glint in his eye!

Um, amazing. That vast cavern of the mouth,

and those gill rakers almost encircle the entire head.

The first thing you see is a big white cave

coming towards you out of the gloom.

Just behind you now.

He's pulled back around for some more.

I think it's getting used to being filmed, this shark.

Just there, lads.

-That was moderately close.

-Swished the top of your head.

Of course, the defence of these animals is their size.

And I've just got a tiny glimpse there of the power, that tail.

I almost collected a slime sample on my head, you know.

It was that big old tail, bam, and it moved a percussive wave of water.

So yeah, that was quite exciting, bordering on very exciting.

I'm like a sort of wasp at a picnic as far as they're concerned.

Just a little bit annoying, and you know, better somewhere else.

So leave the big fellas to get on with it. A couple more shots...

and then we're away.

There we go.

Oh, wow.

Look at the mouth, that's magic.

It's undeniably great fun, I'm not even going to pretend it isn't.

And an amazing life-enhancing experience.

But it's also important stuff, you know.

If we can clearly identify the males and the females,

through photography in the water,

then they get a little bit more information about the basking shark.

And it's great fun, did I mention it was great fun? I think I probably did.

'Next time: investigating the impact of an experimental energy project

'on whales and dolphins.' Oh, brilliant.

'The world's scariest harbour entrance.'

Isn't that's lovely?

'And a magical encounter with inquisitive seals.'

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