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Shark Drunk

The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean

Read by P.J. Ochlan
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A salty story of friendship, adventure, and the explosive life that teems beneath the ocean
 
The Lofoten archipelago, just North of the Arctic Circle, is a place of unsurpassed beauty—the skyline spikes with dramatic peaks; the radiant greens and purples of the Northern Lights follow summers where the sun never sets. It’s a place of small villages, where the art of fishing, though evolving, is still practiced in traditional ways.

Beneath the great depths surrounding these islands lurks the infamous Greenland shark. At twenty-four feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not known just for its size: Its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory. Shark Drunk is the true story of two friends, the author and the eccentric artist Hugo Aasjord, as they embark on a wild pursuit of the famed creature—all from a tiny rubber boat.

Together they tackle existential questions and encounter the world’s most powerful maelstrom as they attempt to understand the ocean from every possible angle, drawing on poetry, science, history, ecology, mythology, and their own—sometimes intoxicated—observations, meanwhile pursuing the elusive Greenland shark. By turns thrilling, wise, and hilarious, Shark Drunk is a celebration of adventure, marine life, and, above all, friendship.

Winner of the Norwegian Brage Prize 2015
Winner of the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature 2015
Winner of the Norwegian Reine Ord Prize at Lofoten International Literature Festival 2016
Wanted: one medium-sized Greenland shark, ten to fifteen feet in length and weighing about thirteen hundred pounds. Latin name: Somniosus microcephalus. Blunt, rounded snout, cigar-shaped body, relatively small fins. Gives birth to live offspring. Lives in the North Atlantic and even swims under the floating ice cap at the North Pole. Prefers temperatures close to freezing but can also tolerate warmer water. Can dive to a depth of four thousand feet or more. The teeth in its lower jaw are as small as a saw blade’s. The teeth in the upper jaw are equally sharp but significantly bigger, and are used to bore into the prey while the lower teeth saw their way through. In addition to saw-blade teeth, it has, like a few other types of shark, suctioning lips that “glue” larger prey to its mouth while chewing. And every mating act is violent. On the bright side, the Greenland shark does not have sex until it’s about 150 years old.

Scientists who have examined the stomach contents of Greenland sharks have encountered many surprises. How is it possible that in Greenland, Fridtjof Nansen (1861– 1930), the famed Norwegian scientist, explorer, and politician, opened the stomach of a shark he’d caught and found a whole seal, eight large cods, a ling four feet long, a big halibut head, and several chunks of whale blubber? Nansen claimed, by the way, that the shark was able to live for several days even after this “huge, ugly animal” had been cut open and placed on ice.

The eye parasite Ommatokoita elongata, which is about two inches long, slowly devours the cornea of the Greenland shark, until it goes blind. In the folds of its belly the shark also has other parasites in the form of little yellow crabs (Aega arctica). Old shark fishermen have recounted how the parasites would fall off by the hundreds when the shark was hoisted aboard.

The Greenland shark can be used for more than just making sandpaper and nitroglycerin. Its flesh is poisonous, smells like urine, and can serve as a potent drug. The Inuit used to feed the meat to their dogs, if nothing else was available. But the dogs would get extremely intoxicated and might even end up paralyzed for days. During World War I, there was a shortage of food in many places in the north, and people couldn’t be choosy. There was more than enough meat from Greenland sharks. But if people ate the meat when it was fresh, or neglected to treat it in the proper way, they could get “shark drunk,” because the flesh contains the nerve gas trimethylamine oxide.

The resultant inebriated state is supposedly similar to taking in an extreme amount of alcohol or hallucinogenic drugs. Shark drunk people speak incoherently, see visions, stagger, and act very crazy. When they finally fall asleep, it’s nearly impossible to wake them up. To avoid these side effects, you need to cut the main artery of a Greenland shark immediately, so that the blood drains out. Then the meat can be dried or boiled in water, which has to be changed several times. In Iceland, the shark (called hákarl) is considered a delicacy, but there everyone is careful to prepare the meat properly. To make the poisons disappear requires repeated boiling, drying, or even burying the meat until it ferments.

It should be no surprise that people living in northern Norway developed a healthy skepticism when it comes to the meat of the Greenland shark. The reason they even bothered to catch it was because the liver is extremely rich in oil. In the 1950s, Norway was the leader in commercial fishing for the Greenlandshark, but by the early 1960s, demand was already fading. Only now is it making a small comeback.



Our boat is gently bobbing in the sunshine in Vestfjorden. Yesterday the sea glittered and crackled with light. Today it has a steady, calm glow. The ocean has found its lowest resting pulse, as it does only after many days of good weather in the summertime. It’s also a neap tide, which means the difference between high and low tide is unusually small. The gravitational force of the moon and the sun pull the sea in opposite directions, canceling each other out to a certain extent, like when two people arm-wrestle and neither has an advantage.

Our only task is to wait and keep an eye on the floats. Maybe it’s because we’re drifting in Vestfjorden—where the currents function just fine on their own even when there’s no wind—that Hugo happens to think of a story about one time when he and his brother were out in their fishing smack. The boat, called the Plingen, was a small carvel-built vessel made in Namdalen in the 1950s. The fishing smack was waterlogged and sat low in the sea. In bad weather they had to pump out the water frantically by hand. One ice-cold day during the Lofoten fishing season in 1984, the two brothers went out during a squall. The motor wouldn’t start, but another boat in the fishing grounds saw they were in trouble and towed them back to Svolvær.

That reminds Hugo of a similar situation. They were on board the Helnessund heading out of Svolvær after picking upa cargo of fresh shrimp that had been caught farther north in Finnmark. When a storm blew in, the boat quickly ran into trouble. The refrigeration unit failed and the cargo shifted. The freighter ended up drifting in the middle of Vestfjorden. By using countless buckets of seawater, they were finally able to cool down the engine enough to make it over to Skrova.

Hugo often makes these sorts of associative leaps. When one story starts getting a bit worn out, it taps the next one on the back and sends it off, in a relay race that can go on and on. The stories usually move further and further away from the starting point. Sometimes I get confused and wonder what Hugo’s stories have to do with anything at all.

But something about what he has already told me makes Hugo think of Måløya, one of the small islands on the seawardside of Steigen. That’s the location of a tiny, abandoned community that Hugo was curious about. Together with his brother, he dropped anchor and left the fishing smack to row a skiff, or reksa, as Hugo always calls these small wooden rowboats, toward a gently sloping sandy beach. But they misjudged the waves, and the little reksa got tossed around. Both brothers ended up in the icy water. They went ashore but didn’t stay long because it was late winter, and the air and water were freezing. On their way back to the fishing smack, the reksa again filled up with water because a small crack in the bottom was now much bigger after the rowboat had been tossed by the waves. Just before the reksa sank, the brothers managed to grab hold of the fishing smack, not by the gunwale, but farther down. They clung to the small gap along the side of the deck where the water runs out. It was impossible for them to haul themselves on board, exhausted as they were, and with their soaked clothing heavy with seawater. After hanging there for a while, side by side like in some cartoon, they both realized how absurd the situation was and burst out laughing. But their strength was about to give out, and they needed to focus all their efforts on one last-ditch attempt to save themselves. So Hugo became a human ladder for his brother to climb up and clamber on board.

If Hugo had lost his grip before his brother made it on deck, it’s unlikely either of them would be here to tell the story. But Hugo seems to think the main point of the whole tale is that a person doesn’t actually get all that cold by floating in Vestfjordenfor nearly half an hour in March.

“We stayed out for the rest of the day, and without changing our clothes. Although, I have to admit that behind our ears ,and at the back of our necks—that’s where the cold settled.”

Sometimes I wonder whether my friend is actually part seamammal.




Translated by Tiina Nunnally.
“Strøksnes beautifully describes the midnight sun, majestic fjords and moody stretches of sea…[and] brings a little-known world to life…. A homage to the sea and a call to arms to protect the ecosystem that humans treat so abysmally yet rely on so much.” The Economist

“Melville’s Ahab and Hemingway’s Old Man spring to mind. . . . Rich and fascinating. . . . Morten Strøksnes’s clever trick is to remind us for one last time that the catching of the big fish is the least important part of the story.” The Wall Street Journal

“Utterly engrossing… A triumph… A work of meditation and wonder with a horizon as wide and open as the far Nordic coastlines that [Strøksnes] so beautifully evokes.” The Spectator (London)
 
“Strøksnes follows his capacious curiosity…. The end result reads a bit as if Geoff Dyer had written ‘Jaws.’” The New York Times
 
“Its beauty, undemanding science and soothing, musing qualities have made [Shark Drunk] a bestseller in Norway and beyond. In vexed times, gently informative escapism is a winner for publishers and a refuge for readers. Strøksnes nails the appeal.” The Guardian
 
“Strøksnes’s erudition, salty humor, and unfussy prose yield a fresh, engrossing natural history.” Publishers Weekly
 
“Outré cool . . .  [A] chromatic, investigative work . . .  There is [a] wonderful radiance [to] these two gents out chasing their curiosity [and] that romantic mingling of terror and beauty, the sublime.” San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Accomplished Norwegian historian, journalist, and photographer Strøksnes invites readers into the fantastical ocean environment of his quest to capture a Greenland shark. . . Readers will happily devour this smorgasbord of delights.” Kirkus
“Move over, Ishmael. Move over, Jonah. Move over, Izaak Walton and Norman Maclean. Make room for a fish tale, wry and fantastical, weird and melancholy, that must now take its rightful place among our classic existential stories about the denizens of the deep.” —Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice

“The Greenland shark is the bait, but the point is not to catch the fish. Shark Drunk is a phantasmagoric journey, both ultra-vivid and laconic, through the history and natural history of a remarkable region, its teeming seas and tough, resourceful locals. Strøksnes weaves his tale from a dense wool of close observation, fishing yarns, erudition lightly worn, and a helpless, consuming love of the ocean.” —William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days

“A beautifully crafted, slyly funny meditation on friendship, nature, history, literature, and most of all, the sea. That, and a gripping adventure tale about a hunt for a flesh-eating, razor-skinned sea monster. I don’t know how Strøksnes makes it work, but he does, brilliantly.” —Mitchell Zuckoff, author of 13 Hours

“Gorgeously written and thoroughly addictive. With the open-minded inquisitiveness of Charles Darwin and the obsession of Captain Ahab, Strøksnes heads out to sea, chasing a monster of the deep known as the Greenland shark. Every page feels like a cabinet of curiosities, filled with head-scratching surprises, nuggets of wisdom, and wondrous insights.” —Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods

“Some great quests defy any logical explanation but by virtue of their whimsical turns lead to unexpected wonder and enlightenment. This is one such quest—it transports us with humor and insight to forbidding coasts and unexplored depths.” —Peter Stark, author of Astoria

“An epic fishing trip reels in fascinating sea lore in this briny eco-adventure. . . .  The author ponders everything related to the ocean, including bizarre luminous squids of the inky depths, frolicking orca pods and sperm whales, ancient disquisitions on maritime monsters, flinty islanders who live off the sea, and the close, testy relationships between fishing friends. Strøksnes’s erudition, salty humor, and unfussy prose yield a fresh, engrossing natural history.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Accomplished Norwegian historian, journalist, and photographer Strøksnes invites readers into the fantastical ocean environment of his quest to capture a Greenland shark. . . . readers will happily devour this smorgasbord of delights.” —Kirkus
© Alva Gehrmann
MORTEN STRØKSNES is a Norwegian historian, journalist, photographer, and writer. He has written reportage, essays, portraits, and columns and reviews for most major Norwegian newspapers and magazines. He has published four critically acclaimed books of literary reportage and contributed to several others.

Translated by Tiina Nunnally. View titles by Morten Stroksnes

About

A salty story of friendship, adventure, and the explosive life that teems beneath the ocean
 
The Lofoten archipelago, just North of the Arctic Circle, is a place of unsurpassed beauty—the skyline spikes with dramatic peaks; the radiant greens and purples of the Northern Lights follow summers where the sun never sets. It’s a place of small villages, where the art of fishing, though evolving, is still practiced in traditional ways.

Beneath the great depths surrounding these islands lurks the infamous Greenland shark. At twenty-four feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not known just for its size: Its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory. Shark Drunk is the true story of two friends, the author and the eccentric artist Hugo Aasjord, as they embark on a wild pursuit of the famed creature—all from a tiny rubber boat.

Together they tackle existential questions and encounter the world’s most powerful maelstrom as they attempt to understand the ocean from every possible angle, drawing on poetry, science, history, ecology, mythology, and their own—sometimes intoxicated—observations, meanwhile pursuing the elusive Greenland shark. By turns thrilling, wise, and hilarious, Shark Drunk is a celebration of adventure, marine life, and, above all, friendship.

Winner of the Norwegian Brage Prize 2015
Winner of the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature 2015
Winner of the Norwegian Reine Ord Prize at Lofoten International Literature Festival 2016

Excerpt

Wanted: one medium-sized Greenland shark, ten to fifteen feet in length and weighing about thirteen hundred pounds. Latin name: Somniosus microcephalus. Blunt, rounded snout, cigar-shaped body, relatively small fins. Gives birth to live offspring. Lives in the North Atlantic and even swims under the floating ice cap at the North Pole. Prefers temperatures close to freezing but can also tolerate warmer water. Can dive to a depth of four thousand feet or more. The teeth in its lower jaw are as small as a saw blade’s. The teeth in the upper jaw are equally sharp but significantly bigger, and are used to bore into the prey while the lower teeth saw their way through. In addition to saw-blade teeth, it has, like a few other types of shark, suctioning lips that “glue” larger prey to its mouth while chewing. And every mating act is violent. On the bright side, the Greenland shark does not have sex until it’s about 150 years old.

Scientists who have examined the stomach contents of Greenland sharks have encountered many surprises. How is it possible that in Greenland, Fridtjof Nansen (1861– 1930), the famed Norwegian scientist, explorer, and politician, opened the stomach of a shark he’d caught and found a whole seal, eight large cods, a ling four feet long, a big halibut head, and several chunks of whale blubber? Nansen claimed, by the way, that the shark was able to live for several days even after this “huge, ugly animal” had been cut open and placed on ice.

The eye parasite Ommatokoita elongata, which is about two inches long, slowly devours the cornea of the Greenland shark, until it goes blind. In the folds of its belly the shark also has other parasites in the form of little yellow crabs (Aega arctica). Old shark fishermen have recounted how the parasites would fall off by the hundreds when the shark was hoisted aboard.

The Greenland shark can be used for more than just making sandpaper and nitroglycerin. Its flesh is poisonous, smells like urine, and can serve as a potent drug. The Inuit used to feed the meat to their dogs, if nothing else was available. But the dogs would get extremely intoxicated and might even end up paralyzed for days. During World War I, there was a shortage of food in many places in the north, and people couldn’t be choosy. There was more than enough meat from Greenland sharks. But if people ate the meat when it was fresh, or neglected to treat it in the proper way, they could get “shark drunk,” because the flesh contains the nerve gas trimethylamine oxide.

The resultant inebriated state is supposedly similar to taking in an extreme amount of alcohol or hallucinogenic drugs. Shark drunk people speak incoherently, see visions, stagger, and act very crazy. When they finally fall asleep, it’s nearly impossible to wake them up. To avoid these side effects, you need to cut the main artery of a Greenland shark immediately, so that the blood drains out. Then the meat can be dried or boiled in water, which has to be changed several times. In Iceland, the shark (called hákarl) is considered a delicacy, but there everyone is careful to prepare the meat properly. To make the poisons disappear requires repeated boiling, drying, or even burying the meat until it ferments.

It should be no surprise that people living in northern Norway developed a healthy skepticism when it comes to the meat of the Greenland shark. The reason they even bothered to catch it was because the liver is extremely rich in oil. In the 1950s, Norway was the leader in commercial fishing for the Greenlandshark, but by the early 1960s, demand was already fading. Only now is it making a small comeback.



Our boat is gently bobbing in the sunshine in Vestfjorden. Yesterday the sea glittered and crackled with light. Today it has a steady, calm glow. The ocean has found its lowest resting pulse, as it does only after many days of good weather in the summertime. It’s also a neap tide, which means the difference between high and low tide is unusually small. The gravitational force of the moon and the sun pull the sea in opposite directions, canceling each other out to a certain extent, like when two people arm-wrestle and neither has an advantage.

Our only task is to wait and keep an eye on the floats. Maybe it’s because we’re drifting in Vestfjorden—where the currents function just fine on their own even when there’s no wind—that Hugo happens to think of a story about one time when he and his brother were out in their fishing smack. The boat, called the Plingen, was a small carvel-built vessel made in Namdalen in the 1950s. The fishing smack was waterlogged and sat low in the sea. In bad weather they had to pump out the water frantically by hand. One ice-cold day during the Lofoten fishing season in 1984, the two brothers went out during a squall. The motor wouldn’t start, but another boat in the fishing grounds saw they were in trouble and towed them back to Svolvær.

That reminds Hugo of a similar situation. They were on board the Helnessund heading out of Svolvær after picking upa cargo of fresh shrimp that had been caught farther north in Finnmark. When a storm blew in, the boat quickly ran into trouble. The refrigeration unit failed and the cargo shifted. The freighter ended up drifting in the middle of Vestfjorden. By using countless buckets of seawater, they were finally able to cool down the engine enough to make it over to Skrova.

Hugo often makes these sorts of associative leaps. When one story starts getting a bit worn out, it taps the next one on the back and sends it off, in a relay race that can go on and on. The stories usually move further and further away from the starting point. Sometimes I get confused and wonder what Hugo’s stories have to do with anything at all.

But something about what he has already told me makes Hugo think of Måløya, one of the small islands on the seawardside of Steigen. That’s the location of a tiny, abandoned community that Hugo was curious about. Together with his brother, he dropped anchor and left the fishing smack to row a skiff, or reksa, as Hugo always calls these small wooden rowboats, toward a gently sloping sandy beach. But they misjudged the waves, and the little reksa got tossed around. Both brothers ended up in the icy water. They went ashore but didn’t stay long because it was late winter, and the air and water were freezing. On their way back to the fishing smack, the reksa again filled up with water because a small crack in the bottom was now much bigger after the rowboat had been tossed by the waves. Just before the reksa sank, the brothers managed to grab hold of the fishing smack, not by the gunwale, but farther down. They clung to the small gap along the side of the deck where the water runs out. It was impossible for them to haul themselves on board, exhausted as they were, and with their soaked clothing heavy with seawater. After hanging there for a while, side by side like in some cartoon, they both realized how absurd the situation was and burst out laughing. But their strength was about to give out, and they needed to focus all their efforts on one last-ditch attempt to save themselves. So Hugo became a human ladder for his brother to climb up and clamber on board.

If Hugo had lost his grip before his brother made it on deck, it’s unlikely either of them would be here to tell the story. But Hugo seems to think the main point of the whole tale is that a person doesn’t actually get all that cold by floating in Vestfjordenfor nearly half an hour in March.

“We stayed out for the rest of the day, and without changing our clothes. Although, I have to admit that behind our ears ,and at the back of our necks—that’s where the cold settled.”

Sometimes I wonder whether my friend is actually part seamammal.




Translated by Tiina Nunnally.

Reviews

“Strøksnes beautifully describes the midnight sun, majestic fjords and moody stretches of sea…[and] brings a little-known world to life…. A homage to the sea and a call to arms to protect the ecosystem that humans treat so abysmally yet rely on so much.” The Economist

“Melville’s Ahab and Hemingway’s Old Man spring to mind. . . . Rich and fascinating. . . . Morten Strøksnes’s clever trick is to remind us for one last time that the catching of the big fish is the least important part of the story.” The Wall Street Journal

“Utterly engrossing… A triumph… A work of meditation and wonder with a horizon as wide and open as the far Nordic coastlines that [Strøksnes] so beautifully evokes.” The Spectator (London)
 
“Strøksnes follows his capacious curiosity…. The end result reads a bit as if Geoff Dyer had written ‘Jaws.’” The New York Times
 
“Its beauty, undemanding science and soothing, musing qualities have made [Shark Drunk] a bestseller in Norway and beyond. In vexed times, gently informative escapism is a winner for publishers and a refuge for readers. Strøksnes nails the appeal.” The Guardian
 
“Strøksnes’s erudition, salty humor, and unfussy prose yield a fresh, engrossing natural history.” Publishers Weekly
 
“Outré cool . . .  [A] chromatic, investigative work . . .  There is [a] wonderful radiance [to] these two gents out chasing their curiosity [and] that romantic mingling of terror and beauty, the sublime.” San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Accomplished Norwegian historian, journalist, and photographer Strøksnes invites readers into the fantastical ocean environment of his quest to capture a Greenland shark. . . Readers will happily devour this smorgasbord of delights.” Kirkus
“Move over, Ishmael. Move over, Jonah. Move over, Izaak Walton and Norman Maclean. Make room for a fish tale, wry and fantastical, weird and melancholy, that must now take its rightful place among our classic existential stories about the denizens of the deep.” —Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice

“The Greenland shark is the bait, but the point is not to catch the fish. Shark Drunk is a phantasmagoric journey, both ultra-vivid and laconic, through the history and natural history of a remarkable region, its teeming seas and tough, resourceful locals. Strøksnes weaves his tale from a dense wool of close observation, fishing yarns, erudition lightly worn, and a helpless, consuming love of the ocean.” —William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days

“A beautifully crafted, slyly funny meditation on friendship, nature, history, literature, and most of all, the sea. That, and a gripping adventure tale about a hunt for a flesh-eating, razor-skinned sea monster. I don’t know how Strøksnes makes it work, but he does, brilliantly.” —Mitchell Zuckoff, author of 13 Hours

“Gorgeously written and thoroughly addictive. With the open-minded inquisitiveness of Charles Darwin and the obsession of Captain Ahab, Strøksnes heads out to sea, chasing a monster of the deep known as the Greenland shark. Every page feels like a cabinet of curiosities, filled with head-scratching surprises, nuggets of wisdom, and wondrous insights.” —Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods

“Some great quests defy any logical explanation but by virtue of their whimsical turns lead to unexpected wonder and enlightenment. This is one such quest—it transports us with humor and insight to forbidding coasts and unexplored depths.” —Peter Stark, author of Astoria

“An epic fishing trip reels in fascinating sea lore in this briny eco-adventure. . . .  The author ponders everything related to the ocean, including bizarre luminous squids of the inky depths, frolicking orca pods and sperm whales, ancient disquisitions on maritime monsters, flinty islanders who live off the sea, and the close, testy relationships between fishing friends. Strøksnes’s erudition, salty humor, and unfussy prose yield a fresh, engrossing natural history.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Accomplished Norwegian historian, journalist, and photographer Strøksnes invites readers into the fantastical ocean environment of his quest to capture a Greenland shark. . . . readers will happily devour this smorgasbord of delights.” —Kirkus

Author

© Alva Gehrmann
MORTEN STRØKSNES is a Norwegian historian, journalist, photographer, and writer. He has written reportage, essays, portraits, and columns and reviews for most major Norwegian newspapers and magazines. He has published four critically acclaimed books of literary reportage and contributed to several others.

Translated by Tiina Nunnally. View titles by Morten Stroksnes