Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 280, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1912 — GIRL HOOKS SHARK [ARTICLE]

GIRL HOOKS SHARK

Man-Eater Pulled in From Deck of Ocean Liner. Young Tourist In Casting Lines In Water for Amusement When Bhe Gets a Real Bite and Makes a Record Catch. New York. —Shark fishing has long since assumed the proportions of a gentle art down Costa Rica way, according to the stock tales of returning tourists, but it remained for a winsome Brooklyn girl—Miss Cecile des Place —to startle the natives with a catch that set angler tongues wagging all up and down the wild coast. With fifteen minutes fishing to her credit, Miss Des Place landed a 300pound man-eating shark that set the populace of Port Limon by the ears and caused her name to be displayed in scarehead type in the Costa Rican dallies. Her coup was set down as an epoch marker in a country where men haul up the monsters of the deep for a living and make big catches every day of the week. Mi as Des Place arrived home aboard the Hamburg-American liner Prinz August Wilhelm, and in her traveling bag were several long teeth pulled from the head of her big sensational catch as souvenirs. She Intends to have them appropriately mounted and set up as an ornament in her parlor of the Des Place home in Brooklyn. The pretty shark catcher manifested considerable diffidence in discussing her coup over at the pier the other morning, but there were plenty of her friends on board who were not averse to telling just how it happened. “You see, it was this way,” one of them explained. “We were anchored in the harbor of Port Limon, one of the prettiest on the Costa Rican coast, by the way, and the tourists on board for want of something more profitable to do fell to casting lines into the clear limpid water that swished so rhythmically alongside the vesseL Miss Des Place watched the

sport for a while and then expressed a desire to try her hand. Her request was granted, and what do you think? No sooner had she settled to a watch oh the bobbing cork than the line stretched taut and something began making away with the other end of 1L “Miss Des Place was jerked against the railing and might have gone overboard had not two or three of her companions grabbed her. Stronger hands seized the line, and after a thir-ty-minute tussle we got the ’catch' aboard. It was the biggest catch of the day regardless of vessel or, point on shore. It was a shark just like the pictures you see in those wild sea stories. We weighed the monster and the scales tipped 300 pounds. Of course no woman in Costa Rica had ever accomplished a feat of that magnitude before, and Miss Des Place was a heroine with the Port Limon folk during the remainder of our stay there.” The heroine agreed in the generalities of the story, but professed too much modesty to go into details from her viewpoint “It was merely an accident” she said, and let it go at that