27th July 1968 revisited

The Shark Angling club of Great Britain often get asked for replacement membership or challenge trophy certificates which, provided our records confirm we are are happy to supply. A couple of weeks back we had such a request but this was a little different. In 1968 a young lad called John Lister caught a 103lb Blue Shark on the boat Nautilus which was skippered by Eric Brown. Being only 11 years old he was unable to apply for junior membership but the club did provide him with a non members certificate to record his achievement.

Sadly the certificate got lost in a fire and John asked if we could replace it. Fortunately we were able to locate the records for that year and sure enough just as John had said, on the 27th July 1968, the fish had been recorded. A little more work confirmed the name of the secretary at the time so we were able to produce a replacement non members certificate including the correct sec-retary name.

To have caught such a magnificent fish unaided at such a young age was tremendous achieve-ment, so replacing this certificate was just a little bit different than the normal replacement requests.

John, on behalf of the Shark Angling Club of great Britain congratulations once again on your achievement.