Gossip, rumours and alternative facts of the ex-President Trump variety - these are a lot more fun than factual truth and will spread rapidly through any small community.
One morning last December we went for our usual morning swim from a beach in San Sebastián, where the sea had lost its summer warmth but was still fine at around 20 degrees. Not an ideal temperature for floating around lazily on inflatable plastic swans but that’s not what we do.
Pause for reflection: I’ve never actually owned an inflatable plastic swan. Nor even a bright green alligator. In those hazy, distant days of childhood in England we used old, patched inner tubes from car tyres, supplied mysteriously by my grandfather. But no, the point of our daily swim now is to keep fit. Muscle tone, bone strength, lung capacity, cardiovascular health… Regularly immersing your head in cold water can even stave off the dreaded Alzheimer’s, I’ve read somewhere. I think. Can’t remember where.
So it was a little disturbing when someone passed on the gossip, rumour or alternative fact that a swimmer that very same morning, at that very same beach, had been bitten by a shark. This was so obviously ridiculous that it had to be a joke. Look, this isn’t Bondi Beach or Hawaii, this is La Gomera! We don’t do sharks.
We do have fish in the bay. People with black neoprene wetsuits, snorkels and goggles swim out to observe them, especially further from the shore where there’s a line of sunken rocks designed to protect the beach from rough seas or Russian mini-submarines. Sometimes we see a shoal of tiny fish as we enter the water. Sometimes we see a larger fish leaping into the air with its tail wagging, perhaps to escape from an even bigger one, or just for the joy of being a fish. Occasionally I detect a fishy smell in a patch of water as I swim through, suggesting that something has eaten something else and left a few bits and pieces behind. This is real life in the marine environment and a hopeful sign that not everything out there has died from ingesting plastic bags. But sharks! Oh, come on…
That same evening we read in one of the island’s online newsletters that the town council had closed all the beaches, cordoned them off with red-and-white striped tape, because someone had been bitten by a shark. Oof!
Arturo in his café, at coffee time the next morning: yes, it was true. Bitten by a shark. She trod on it.
Well, at least we do things differently here. I had never heard of anyone treading on a shark, not even an Australian. Details emerged gradually from Arturo and others. The victim was a long-term resident here, a woman who swam regularly, and she’d trodden on the shark as she was walking into the water. The good news was that this was not the Bondi Beach kind of shark that takes a large mouthful from your leg then backs away to await results, this was something most people wouldn’t recognise as a shark at all. It’s called a tiburón angelote, angelshark, and is similar in shape to the little angelfish that people buy for their tropical aquaria, with a broad, flat body. An ambush hunter, its mottled brown colour enables it to lie unseen on the seabed until its luckless prey swims over, when it springs up, grabs it with double rows of needle-sharp teeth then sucks the whole thing in like an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.
This particular angelshark had not hoovered up Helga in her entirety, it had merely fastened its jaws around her thigh and tried hard enough for her to feel the suction, but she’s a lot bigger than an angelshark and quickly beat it off. She thinks that she stepped on it without realising as she was wading into the sea, quite far out, and it began to swim away but then she launched herself into an energetic crawl and it thought she was attacking it, so naturally it retaliated. Not the fish’s fault.
I thought it was very understanding of her to see it from the creature’s point of view in this way, but then, foreigners who choose to live in La Gomera are of course extraordinarily wise and understanding people. The Gomerans themselves dismissed the event as being of little consequence and the beaches opened again the next day, once the identity of the perpetrator had been established. The angelote is not really a shark in the everyday sense of the word and they will never attack as long as you don’t tread on them. ‘Look,’ said Miguel, another daily swimmer, ‘if you tread on a dog’s tail, what’s it going to do?’
We’ve never seen an angelshark in more than thirty years of living here. Normally they hunt much further out from the shore, where non-expert snorkellers may mistake them for rays because they look much the same, but we have now taken to splashing more enthusiastically as we walk into the water, just in case. Helga has two rows of little toothmarks on her thigh to boast about and a good story to tell her future grandchildren, who won’t believe her. Bitten by an angel?! Oh, granny...
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Our angelshark is of the species squatina squatina but there are many more in the same genus, squatina. They’re found over large areas of the globe, including the coasts of Britain, but this one is classified as an endangered species. They are fished commercially for food, and overfished as is normal practice these days, but catches are now regulated to try and conserve them.
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