Monday, April 30, 2018

Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean Hardcover – June 27, 2017 by Morten Stroksnes (Knopf)



Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean was quite the pleasant surprise. I thought 8+ hours of audiobook was a bit long to listen about someone catching a shark but this endeavor is only the background music to what ended up being a plethora of perspective and education about the sea and all the life that inhabits it.

I've stated on other reviews that the ocean is my favorite place to be in the entire world and it is worth saying it again. I loved all of the information Morten A. Strøksnes generously provided in this book. But because this book appears to be marketed and sold as a shark fishing adventure so to speak, I did still want some resolution. Ongoing attempts at scouting out the elusive Greenland shark were scattered throughout this book, but it wasn't until the final five minutes via audio that any progress was made. No, I didn't want to read 8+ hours of shark fishing stories but I also was a bit surprised that the climax was left until the very, very end. No matter, Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean was a captivating book of science, history, ecology, mythology, culture, and friendship, and I'm glad I read it. A pleasant surprise indeed. Check it out!

My favorite quote:
"When the waves slam against the rocks, they shatter and turn to spray. Water molecules dance around on the world's oceans, dissolving, evaporating, cooling, and combining in new ways. The drops that strike my face have been in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Bay of Biscay, through the Bering Strait, and around the Cape of Good Hope many times. Maybe over the eons they've actually been in all the oceans, both big and small. In the form of rain they have washed over dry land; there they have been lapped up thousands of times by animals, people, and plants, only to evaporate, transpire, or run back out to sea, again and again. Over billions of years the water molecules have been everywhere on earth."

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