Remarkable objects are regularly fished from the North Sea. Just last week, an already dead, huge shark weighing 200 kilos and five meters long was pulled out of the water. NH lists the five most impressive finds.
1. Giant Halibut
In 2017, a fisherman from Den Helder achieved a other giant from the North Sea. Not a shark, but a six-foot-long halibut. According to the fisherman, that is really huge: “Normally, a halibut is only 80-90 centimeters long. This is just a person hanging on a line,” said fisherman Mick Zijlstra at the time. The giant weighed between 70 and 80 kilograms.
2. Warrior
A Wieringer fisherman was surprised when he looked straight into the face of a ‘warrior’. During shrimp fishing, the fishermen fished an ancient wooden statue of 30 by 40 centimeters out of the water. According to archaeologists, it is a ‘rare masterpiece, a jewel’. The statue dates from the 17th century. It may be a gable piece, an end piece of a fence on the starboard or port side.
3. Tusk
Even older is the discovery of Texel shrimp fisherman Jan Simon de Haan. On the Wadden Sea he had the tusk of a woolly mammoth in its nets. The colossus is almost 2.5 meters long and is probably from the period of the last ice age, about 50,000 years ago.
4. Deep mine
Helderse fishing cutters were shocked when they saw a huge depth mine from the Second World War in their nets. The, according to the EOD, German Luftmine bomb had to be detonated immediately. The thing was dangerous. The fishermen were able to watch the explosion from a safe distance.
0423_depth – NH News
5. Leatherback Turtle
In 2009 Texel skippers recovered a dead one leatherback turtle from the sea. The turtle, the largest in the world, was spotted alive off the coast a few days later. The animal can reach a carapace length of about three meters. According to Pierre Bonnet of Ecomare, they are ‘extremely rare animals’ and do not occur in the North Sea.