After a week of borderline weather and a few wet touch – and – go fishing sessions, a big Atlantic low pressure system has finally smacked into us from the west and put paid to any notions I might have had of getting out tonight. This is no big deal though, as it gives me the opportunity to sort through the drawers of my study desk, a job I’ve been avoiding for a while now.
The study is the only truly quiet spot in my house. In the hurricane of work, family and fishing that is my life, this is the eye, the quiet backwater where I’m able to fetch up from time to time. And like other backwaters, tucked out of the way of the main flow, it tends to accumulate its fair share of detritus.
Sorting through the ridiculous array of oddments, some found, some bought, some inherited (I’ve still not had the chance to use those huge brass booms) and some even invented, an image of myself is forming.
They say that every day we are leaving behind little bits of ourselves – skin, hair, so that every seven years or so our body completely renews itself outwardly, our visage looking very different even though we’ve not felt a thing.
So too are our fishing selves built up and cast off so that we are eventually able to follow the trail of ourselves back through the now slightly outmoded plastic bait clips and chunky 3/0 stainless steel baitholders with their vicious barbed shanks, until we come face to face with someone we once knew extremely well, but who is now no more than a near stranger left behind long ago.
But some characters, whether it be through a solid, lifelong friendship or a gentler, warm affection, tend to stick around for quite a bit longer. It is only very recently that I parted company with one such character.
*
Like any youngster, from the moment I first took up a fishing rod I developed an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I quickly drained my ever patient grandfathers of any information they could provide, and soon latched onto the local population of fishermen, watching, questioning and generally making a nuisance of myself. But even these weren’t enough to assuage my hankerings.
It was at this point that I bumped into a new friend in y local newsagent. His name? Well, let’s call him C. Angler.
C. Angler was a mine of useful information, and every month he would give up a nugget or two that I would carry around with me like a family heirloom so that I could dust them off once in a while and display them proudly. Many of these were actually more precious than I realised at the time. It wasn’t until C. Angler told me that I realised the ebb tide could be fished as well as the flood. Imagine that! Twice the chance of catching fish!
C. Angler knew all the best beaches and had fished in lots of faraway foreign places where I had always dreamed about wetting a line, many of which I still dream about: Norway, the Faroe Islands and the Florida Keys. He was also a regular at the best hotspots up and down the country; there wasn’t a week went by that didn’t see C. Angler casting out at LLangennith, Loch Etive or the Admiralty breakwater. He had fished with Alan Yates, Paul Kerry, Neil Mackellow, and a whole clutch of other international standard anglers who included him in their list of close acquaintances, and all of the stories, the catches and the disappointments would be shared with me every month when he would visit without fail.
There are many skills that C. Angler first pointed out to me, much like an indulgent uncle quietly instructing the over-excited, yammering nephew. Skills like casting, bait presentation, tackle maintenance and all the different techniques needed for targeting various species of fish. Every one of these appropriately timed pointers has, over the years, had a formative impact upon the way I have fished.
But the years moved, I grew older on and things started to change. After a while I found that the stories didn’t delight me so much as they used to and came to realise that I had heard many of them, or incarnations of them at least, before. At first this was fine (no-one can turn up their nose at a good fishing yarn, not even an old one) but they soon began to lose their sheen, spiced up only occasionally with the odd little titbit of new stuff. Dare I say it, C. Angler was even beginning to bore me a little.
This was most alarming and not a little disheartening. I had practically grown up in C. Angler’s company, yet here I was questioning his place in my life. Desperate to get to the bottom of this, I racked my brains to try to discover what had changed about him.
But I soon realised it wasn’t he who had changed, but me. He was still that benevolent uncle dispensing words of wisdom, but now that I had grown up I was more like the independent teenager than the young nuisance. I had found my own way of approaching angling, assimilating the tips and tricks so that they were now part of my own repertoire, but the plainest fact was that I was now less interested in the how, and more in the why of fishing.
So it was that C. Angler and I decided that an amicable parting of ways was best all round. No doubt, I’ll keep an eye out, and maybe even catch up with him now and again for the occasional trip or down memory lane. I could never resist a good yarn.
© copyright Simon Smith 2012
