Stricken oil rig ‘attacked by confused pensioner shark’, claim salvage team

The salvage team tasked with boarding and assessing the stricken Scottish oil rig Transocean Winner have revealed that a “likely confused and belligerent” Greenland shark was responsible for the damage, based on old brown teeth found embedded in an oil tank decorated by a vast visage of a young boy floundering on a lilo.

It was being towed from Norway to Turkey earlier this month, after the rig had been declared free of Gulenist influence, when an incident occurred which broke the rig clear of its tug and saw it go to ground outside Dalmore, where the leaking oil was pilfered by the nearby distillery and reconstituted as ‘Dalmore Black Whisky’, available now for just £98 per 70cl bottle.

Initially the accident was believed to be caused by bad weather, despite claims by the tug boat’s captain that “I done be seen the beast, beast she was and fangs up the clunge”, yet the first assessment by the rig’s salvagers appear to back the salty sea dog and suggest that at least one Greenland shark is active in Scottish waters.

A spokesperson for Loveshit, the salvaging firm hired to investigate the rig, announced this morning that the first report from their team confirmed “some kind of confused pensioner shark mistook a tank for a huge lad” and then tried to “gouge its tasty belly out”, before it “became belligerent and climbed up one of the legs to find the complaints department”.

He added: “Based on the really nasty teeth left behind, and the confused yet oddly certain pattern of attack, it’s fair to say this was some kind of shark, but a mad shark, mad with bad age and some wacky concepts brought on by an old brain. We’re not sure what it was doing this far outside of its natural habitat, but we suspect it had an oyster card. Hehe. Get it? Oyster card. Oysters.”

The nature of the attack and the physical evidence found has connected the incident to the long-living Greenland Shark, which was recently found to have an incumbent almost four hundred years old and with a set of eyes that are simply to die for.

Eminent marine biologist Charles Flotsam-Dinghy told The Daily Belter that sharks do have the “propensity for dementia”, particularly if they live for absurdly long amounts of time, and admitted that there is a “very strong chance” that one of them may have “become lost and seen distant hope in the entrails of a moon-faced child”.

He said: “It’s well known that sharks don’t get cancer, but that doesn’t mean they can’t suffer from other ailments, like diarrhoea and herpes, so it’s quite possible that if the shark in question did live for a good four centuries or so, it would endure neurological decay and start going the wrong way, trying to eat the wrong things and voting in ways we don’t like.

“Honestly, there’s no way to know how a shark thinks, or in this case, misthinks. Unless we become the shark, of course, but that would mean swimming around in the sea non-stop just eating and moving and eating and moving, which I’ll be doing as an experiment next year. I give myself a thirty percent chance of success, and I don’t like those odds.”

The revelation has provoked Lisa Dee-Cripp, a founding member of the Alzheimer’s charity Good Dementors, to insist that the shark “does not represent those in the dementia community” and that “most people with dementia are docile and friendly, overly so in many cases”.

A 300 metre exclusion zone has been set up around the rig to prevent harm caused by the spilled oil, a potential return from the baffled culprit or the melancholy associated with seeing a moored drilling platform out of context, but this measure is not enough for some in the political community.

Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale was quick to point the finger as she tweeted: “Yet more rope for SNP. They think we can be an independent country based on our oil, but they can’t even protect the rigs from sharks. #GonnaNeedABiggerFuture.”