How the world’s largest squid was caught—and the bidding war for the exclusive footage slated to be shown this spring.
By Matthew Philips Newsweek 7 March, 2007
John Bennett is used to the monotony. As captain of a New Zealand commercial fishing boat, he’s accustomed to spending months at a time afloat in the Antarctic Ocean, staring at—well, nothing. “Just ice really, lots and lots of ice,” says Bennett. “Sometimes, not even a seabird.” On a particularly calm day in late January, Bennett was tending to his deep-sea fishing lines—each one 2,000 meters long (nearly a mile and a quarter), and sporting up to 10,000 baited hooks—in hopes of a major toothfish haul. Suddenly, the calm was shattered—by the sight of a colossal squid surfacing near the stern. The beast, a 33-foot-long adult male weighing half a ton, had wrapped itself around one of Bennett’s lines. “It was just this great big brown shape,” recalls Bennett, who was watching from the bridge. “It came up right alongside us. Everyone was yelling and screaming.”
Bennett hurried to the deck to confer with Geoff Dolan, an observer from the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries who was on board. International law requires that anything caught in Antarctic waters must be kept onboard and documented to guard against overfishing. So Bennett really didn’t have a choice but to haul in the squid. “We decided to get him onboard in as good a condition as we could,” says Bennett. “If we’d released him, he wouldn’t have survived.” By then the crew had gaffed the creature in an attempt to get it off the line. But its grip was tight, both on the line and on the five-foot-long toothfish he was eating. “He wasn’t giving up that fish,” says Bennett. “When we finally pulled him in, the fish was half-eaten.” …
As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about Antarctic toothfishing for a New Zealand TV station (that’s Chilean sea bass to you and me). He was able to capture a good bit of footage of the squid being hauled in. Bennett confirms that a production company in Auckland bought the footage, though he declines to specify what he was paid. An official with the Ministry of Fisheries told NEWSWEEK that offers to buy the footage had been pouring in and that some were “longer than a telephone number.” Bennett said that a documentary featuring the coveted footage should be released sometime in April…
As O’Shea prepares to study the half-ton specimen, he remains convinced there are bigger squids still to be found at sea. “There’s probably a female out there that’s a full ton,” he says, noting that females tend to be half again as large as their male counterparts. Until Bennett sails again, it seems, the half-ton specimen will just have to do.
Full story at Newsweek
Thanks Anthony Matt!