A quiet afternoon in the garden, perhaps the last for this year.
I topped up our wine glasses, then sat back again to enjoy the advancing evening as the day started to wind down. The traffic out on the streets was blurring to a gentle haze of noise and even the M4 link that bisects the town was reduced to whispers, as though snatches of murmured conversation were falling from the windows of the cars as they passed.
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The immediate landscape (if that can ever be the correct choice of word to describe a town centre street) around the garden is a clutter to the eye. Above the level of the wall the skyline is dominated by washing line posts, telegraph poles and street lights, all stacked up in close urban proximity like a fleet of concrete and creosote masts becalmed in the still evening.
Then, BAAA! A burst of sound as close as though the sheep were only twenty yards away, and suddenly I was focusing beyond the posts and poles, my eyes working like one of those soft cinematic dolly zooms that melted the foreground away until they came to rest upon the top of Mynydd Emroch a couple of miles away from where I stood. The low sun was striking the flank of the hill, casting it in a pink glow where a small flock of sheep grazed the slope.
How little we really see things, I thought to myself, until a small change allows some new reality to make itself known, opening up other angles and vantage points from which to look at the world around us, in this case a drop and swift shift in the prevailing winds that carried the bleating of some distant sheep right up to my garden wall.
We both felt the change in the wind, shift slightly in our seats and so, autumn breezed in, not too fast, trailing a hint of coolness like fresh news.
Though neither of us mentioned it yet, we both knew that this subtle change had just occurred. Not enough to make anyone stop or lurch in surprise, but enough to make us feel that new directions were being taken, in the way that someone senses the progression of a journey whilst slumped half-asleep in the passenger seat of a car.
The end of October was nearing. For the previous few weeks, I looked on as the world around me buzzed and crackled with life like a van der Graaf generator so that everywhere I turned, it seemed that life was going into overdrive.
Throughout the summer I was lucky to spot as little as a handful of squirrels each time I went out - their skittish rustlings always seemed to be two steps ahead of me wherever I went; but only a fortnight previously my daughter and I, out for a walk in a local country park, lost count of the number we saw bolting through the undergrowth. Everywhere we turned, we seem to stumble across half buried acorns.
Lately, they seemed to be far less aware of us, so much so that we were able to get within five feet of them on occasion. In fact, now I think about it, this is true of most of the local woodland critters as they all scamper around gathering, nesting and collecting, and why shouldn’t they?
The fragile and finely balanced little ecosystems that bring our countryside to life through the spring and summer face down the barrel of yet another cold, hard winter and as though on autopilot, they have furiously locked into their annual survival routine, laying down what little they can before the first hard frosts begin to bite.
In their scurrying around, they reminded me of little firefighters trying their futile best to damp the world back down as it erupted around them, leaf by leaf, into a billion new flames. Soon they will lose their battle; both the trees and the woodland’s floor will be ablaze.
A few days after the squirrel-spotting session my daughter came barrelling into the house, her friend in tow, shouting “Daddy! Daddy! Come quick; you’ve got to see this!” A small hedgehog snuffled through the gutter at the end of our street. It couldn’t stay here where it would undoubtedly end up as roadkill on the town centre tarmac, but carefully picking it up and placing it in an old washing up bowl ready to take to the local riverside woodland, I could feel just how light and thin it was and realised that it would have to stay up late looking for food or it wouldn’t survive the winter.
We gave it a plate of cat food and then took it to be released and, as I watched it sniff and stumble off through the long grass in search of its next meal, I began to think that in many respects, we humans are not much different. Watch the footage of some humanitarian tragedy on the evening news and you’ll see the similarities in behaviour - masses of human beings blindly stumbling around, guided and driven only by the body’s sheer will to keep going, muscle memory and, to a much greater extent, sheer instinct, filling in the void left by the absence of logical, conscious thought. The human race often likes to congratulate itself on how wonderfully intelligent it is, but when the programming goes wrong, instinct is always there as a saving grace, the last line between us and extinction.
The light started to fail, so we decided to have five more minutes before collecting everything up and heading indoors.
Equinoctial
Across my lap this broken paperback
Waits for the moon’s half-truth
To cast its story in a different light.
A hill breeze we can’t hear
Teases a mime routine from the firs:
Such eloquence in the silence of trees.
Wind chimes percolate
Their rumour through the garden,
Each ring the trill of coming rain.
Unlike you, I lack control
Of that instinct that tells you when
To sleep, to breathe, to turn for home;
The one that sees you so exact
As to arrive at our front door
At the first touch of drizzle,
That has you now casting your eyes
Upwards at the gathering cloud
Filling these hollowed skies,
And clutching the shawl closer to
Your throat, your breast,
As though gathering windfalls.
By the time that we finally finished the wine and began to head inside, the feeling that autumn had most definitely arrived was becoming harder and harder to shake, though it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant thought, knowing what the season brings.
Ever since I was a young boy I’ve loved this season above all others even down to its name drawing a satisfactory, appreciative hum from the mouth, and when you come to love something you take possession of it, harbour a desire to defend it against all-comers, especially foreign pretenders to the title such as the American Fall. I hated that idea as a kid, the fact that such a lovely time of year could be named after a simple mishap. Every time I tried out the imposter it just felt wrong on the lips, creating mental images of grazed knees and scuffed toecaps. It was only after having studied some of that country’s greatest writers at university, luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, Whitman and Frost, that I finally came to appreciate the Fall.
Theirs seemed a fresher, newer look at the world born in a country founded upon endings and new beginnings, a full-blooded appreciation of what comes to be gained and lost and counted as it passes in a fledgling country as opposed to gentle lapping of the years at the foot of the great, unshakeable British Empire of the 19th century. A fleeting vision of what loss truly meant, as picked up here and there in the writings of retrospectively tragic figures such as Keats and Kilvert seemed to resonate even more and help me to see things differently, so that now, even though I love the autumn, I see how everything falls within it: the leaves fall, heads drop a little lower into coat collars; even the sky seems to be lowered like some great boom, bringing with it the rain.
Rain is so much a part of the British psyche that it can sometimes feel that the nation’s bloodstream is diluted by rain water. We factor it into our plans, make allowances for it; at times it can feel like there’s so much rain that it persists only to wash us all out of the way, our spirits and hearts sinking in a wet, grey barrage of newscasts about weather fronts and floods to come across the country.
And then, seemingly in response to my ramblings, the temperature, not to be outdone, also dropped slightly. It seemed to follow us coolly into the kitchen on our coat tails, chilling the air instantly, though, as always, it could never be said to be disagreeable, so we left the door and windows open for a few minutes to encourage it to spend a while indoors.
“What’s up? You’re miles away,” Rachel said as she came in behind me.
“Oh nothing; just daydreaming. Nothing important.” But it had already started. As Rachel continued to potter in a tinkle of glasses, I continued with these thoughts, coming to the realisation that, tragedy aside, by the same measure, we anglers are very much like those little woodland animals in our basic behaviour. When deciding where and when to wet a line the weather, wind, tides, moon phases and air pressure all have us sticking our proverbial noses into the air and sniffing away for all we’re worth.
In fact, once a decision has been made and we arrive at our chosen venue, we actually become a very specific type of animal. Under all the breathable, waterproof clothing, the shelters and thermal boots, there lurks the apex predator, staring down a two hundred lumen beam from the top of the food chain to survey sandbars, gullies, rock features, tidal rips and overshadowed pools in order to gauge the best hunting ground for the night.
Although this idea may be a tad over the top, it is a little thought about fact that the only things separating anglers from, say, a lion or a bear are the abilities to articulate our predatory reasoning and to collate, assimilate and use data in our hunting. Essentially, we are all doing the same thing; it’s just that some animals are a little more sophisticated in how they go about it. Swap the faint scent trail for fishy internet rumours, exchange the familiar rabbit runs or deer trails for a venue that is noted as productive in the diaries and you’re not a million miles away.
I drew the curtains and switched on the lamp, the slight turn in the weather turning my mind over with it as I did so, sputtering every now and then like a lawnmower engine as it caught on the thought that it might, just might, be time for cod. And instantly, things began to gather momentum of their own accord.
I had a venue in mind, one that I hadn’t fished before but had scoped out on a family day out during the summer, (see how the predatory mindset just takes over when given a chance?) noting it as a potential cod venue. A cursory glance at the online weather forecasts told me that the winds, westerlies pregnant with rain, would blow hard all week before dropping in speed and swinging to blow from the northwest on the evening that I was beginning to mentally pencil in, meaning that the sea at the venue would be left coloured and with a little movement, though it would have had the sting taken out of it by the switch in wind direction.
But what bait to take? Worms would be a must if I was to target cod, and in a heavy sea I would usually plump for the extra scent of lugworm, but the dying sea would perhaps call for me to opt for a compromise between scent and movement, taking instead half a pound of wriggling ragworms that would kick around and add enticing movement to the hook. As a supplement I would also take some sandeels and prawns, figuring that the stormy seas of the previous week would have torn through the sand leaving scores of dead and dying fish and shellfish in their wake.
The plan set, the bait chosen, I set off for my chosen spot to fish the last two hours of the ebb and the first of the flood. Driving to the beach was like being at the helm of a spaceship thanks to our having very recently changed the car – endless banks of lights and a slick dashboard that made my old car look like a rickshaw. Still, fuel economy was good, particularly useful if I wanted to fish further afield; and the boot was bigger, great to fit the box and bucket as well as my clothing, without having to make the back seat smelly.
I bumbled off down the road and had gone only twenty or so yards when I noticed a green arrow flash up in front of me. That was strange. A little further down the road and there it went again! It was only after a few hundred yards that I realised that the arrow was telling me when to change gear, not something I’d usually think about, or even have to think about. Really? Okay, that’s new. Time for a bit of music.
NAME FUNCTION.
“Eh?”
NAME FUNCTION. PHONE, CD OR RADIO…
“Er, radio…please.”
RADIO. FM OR MW?
“Um…FM.”
NAME FREQUENCY
And on went my first ever full-blown conversation with a car.
Is this what we’d come to? Must I rely upon technology to help make my decisions? Where will we ever draw the line? I wondered, as I unpacked the car.
Suddenly, for no immediately apparent reason I recalled one night, years before, when I had fished a local breakwater. All through the evening and into darkness I fished the place as I had every other time, anchoring a baited rig hard on the sea bed. After a few biteless hours of standing around I had become too bored to watch the rod tip anymore and so rooted around in the tackle bag for something else, though at this point I wasn’t quite sure what.
What was this at the bottom? My hand closed around something unfamiliar, and I pulled a green and clear plastic float from the bottom. Ah well, in for a penny… Even though I was fishing with a thirteen-foot beachcaster, something rather unsuitable for float fishing, I rigged up a float trace, lobbed the whole lot out a dozen yards and lay back on the rocks, staring up at the sky, and allowing myself to fall into a sleepy indolence.
After half an hour of aimless dreaming, the rod seemed to jump to life in my hands as something slammed into the bait. Lifting the rod and winding the reel through the darkness, I had no idea what was on the other end, or how the hell I was going to get it up the rocks, as the tide had ebbed to almost dead low.
With one final heave, I yanked the rig toward me and a bass of around two pounds appeared out of the darkness and slapped onto a rock three feet away from me. I was astonished. I had caught a fish, and it had all been done by feel. No sight or hearing had been involved at all.
Quickly, I rebaited the rig and cast back out. Over the next couple of hours, I pulled in a string of mackerel, all out of the dark, all on the float, all of them by feel alone.
A good memory, and one that reminded me that I needed no arrows to point me toward the waterline. I needed no conversation to find my way through the tackle box or the process of rigging up, and when I did cast, I would know that it had flown true and far enough, and would also know somehow, without question, that the fish wouldn’t be too far away.
Keeping this memory at the front of my mind, I carried on toward the surf line, though I began to notice that with every step I took, I was gradually lifting, whilst walking, over a series of medium sized sandbars, then feeling the sharp bite of cold water droplets flicked over the tops of my wellies as I sploshed on through small gullies either side of them. Looking out to sea, it was clear from the breaking water and calmer patches behind, that this pattern was repeating itself out to sea for some distance.
The plan wasn’t even thought about; it just sprang immediately to mind. Often the best things do – that insomniac walk that might see you catching a family of foxes at their dawn hunting just before heading home for sleep or that final quick pint that is ordered just a minute before an old friend not seen for months happens to walk through the pub door.
One rod would be fished with a two-hook clipped up paternoster fished up to ninety yards. The hooks would be left flapping but could be clipped up for extra distance as and when needed. This would be fished on the inside edge of the sandbars facing me. On the second rod I clipped a two hook Portsmouth loop rig to deliver the baits a bit further out – up to one hundred and thirty yards, on the outer flanks of some of those small sandbanks. By fishing in this way, my bait would hopefully be trundling around in the natural food collection points.
Every so often, perhaps a handful of times a year, I’ll turn up for a session and it will just feel…right. Conditions will appear to be perfect and I just know that I’ll catch what I set out for. It can’t be explained; it’s just a feeling, but it’s too strong to ignore and it’s often right. In this session, I wanted to catch my first codling of the new autumn/winter season and, as the first bunch of ragworms was punched out to the far side of the sandbank, I felt that I would.
An hour later and I had virtually nothing to show for my efforts. From the very first cast, a combination of debris and a little tide consistently dragged my five-ounce breakout leads and baited rigs in huge, sweeping semi-circular arcs, garnishing the line with pounds of stringy weed. The forces that had so recently reshaped this beach were still in residence and clearly, they were not happy.
In response, I walked thirty yards up tide, casting even further in that direction so that the tide would eventually bring my lead roughly back to a position in front of where I stood, and this seemed to work, although I still only had two juvenile small-eyed rays to show for my efforts, lured by the addition of squid strip to my ragworm-baited double paternoster.
Still, I wasn’t too worried yet. Anglers seem to be pre-programmed with this almost insane, “glass half full” kind of mentality; we always seem to think that better is to come. How many have used phrases like
‘The fish will come on the feed when the light starts to fade’
or
‘The best stage of the tide is yet to come’?
Animals in the wild will do this out of necessity – if some form of prey is not eventually caught, the cubs may well starve – but the fact that mod-cons have taken the necessity of the hunt away from modern mankind only means that anglers are left with a residual need to stay positive, to remain on the search, to spend that extra hour on the beach at four o clock on an October morning that is inexplicable. We call it optimism, others call it madness. My wife simply refers to it as ‘bloody stupidity’.
Even so, after a few hours, even my confidence was beginning to wane. I must have pulled over a hundred pounds of weed from the sea, used most of my bait and was still no closer to catching a codling. Still, the tide was about to turn, so the fish were bound to start feeding…
This was getting serious. Were my instincts going haywire? Then it came to me. Almost blinkered by my blind optimism, I hadn’t paid much attention to the fact that the tide had changed. In a final, desperate throw of the dice, I immediately swapped rigs, exchanging the shorter snooded Portsmouth loop rig for an up and over – a bottom fished snood of over six feet long that clips onto the rig body in order to collapse it down for efficient casting. This would take advantage of the switch and increase in tidal movement, and the fact that the weed had eased slightly after the flood began. At the end of this a bunch of ragworms would waft and wave enticingly in the tide and surely tempt a hungry codling.
A bite! At least it looked a bit like a bite. It had only been fifteen minutes since the change and a single thud shimmered along the rod tip then died in the same movement. Abruptly, everything went slack, the rig sweeping off down tide after being broken out of the bottom, so that I was forced to snatch the rod from the stand.
Slowly, I cranked the rig back to shore by the steady rhythm – pump and wind, pump and wind. I was working hard for this fish, if indeed there was a fish on the end and not just more weed. This was almost insufferable; it seemed like it took an age to get the rig ashore! Finally, the leader knot pinged through the surf, somewhere under another twenty pounds of weed. Not now! The weed had gathered around the leader knot and jammed in the tip ring. Why does this always seem to happen at the worst time rather than on those fishless, quiet sessions? I was going to have to walk this one in, striding backwards, dragging weed and line as I went, all the while scanning the water’s edge for the first sign of – a fish! There was definitely a fish there.
A plump two-pound codling, all freckles and rusted flanks, slid up the beach like a piece of storm-tossed flotsam, into my waiting hands, and there was no explanation needed, at least not in words, for this was justification in itself - the concept made flesh. Sometimes, no matter how expensive the rods and reels, how varied the bait and detailed the information, some fish will simply swim up and strike from somewhere far deeper than the shallow side of a sandbar.
Returning home later, I stowed the gear back in the shed and placed the cleaned fish in the fridge. Making a last cursory glancing check over everything before turning in, I lifted the paperback book I was reading earlier from the table just as the first drops of rain pattered across the glass tabletop.
Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith (with permission). This book is published by and can be purchased from Cambria Books HERE
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