Land & Sea goes fishing for sharks, history and education

There is so much to learn about the ocean off of Newfoundland and Labrador's coast and all the different creatures living in that amazing environment.

So, when someone pitches a Land & Sea idea to me that will give viewers a window into our watery world, well, I'm hooked.

Such was the case last year when reporter Mark Quinn and cameraman Paul Pickett came to me and shared their enthusiasm and their curiosity about sharks. 

We had heard of a tourism operator in Hare Bay, Bonavista Bay, who was carrying out shark fishing tours and gathering information on these apex predators for researchers at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Bryan Oram agreed to let Mark and Paul tag along for a day of adventure on the water. And so, off they went. 

They travelled by boat from Dover to idyllic Bragg's Island where Mark and Paul discovered an interesting connection to the subject matter of the story they were about to tell. 

As it turns out, Bryan Oram's father, Alec Oram, who was born on Bragg's Island, had all kinds of vivid and frightening memories of sharks in that very bay. 

"It had to be destroyed. If we got it, it had to be destroyed." recalled Alec Oram. "And I can remember, here, kids would be out playing and there would be a shark here in the tickle. Somebody with a gun, or three or four people with a gun, and they'd be shooting at it because they were afraid of it."

The senior Oram has fished the waters around Bragg's Island for more than half a century.

He said the attitude he had then was that the only good shark was a dead one.

Like the massive basking shark that tangled in his cod trap back in 1984.

"We had 1,800 pounds of liver and, of course, we cut the fins, and we measured it from its nose to its tail and it was a few inches shy of 30 feet," said Oram. 

And that wasn't the only shark caught in local nets. 

Oram says much smaller sharks, called dogfish, once plagued fish harvesters.