If directly asked what kind of angler I would primarily consider myself to be, I would invariably respond with the words ‘sea angler’. But this is not entirely true, or at least not as accurate as it could be. I can be even more specific than this and refer to myself as a ‘shore angler’.
Despite the lure of bigger fish, more variety, the possibility of more numerous shoals, and the swift undercurrents of deep water measured in fathoms rather than feet and inches, I can honestly say that boat angling has, so far, held no real appeal for me.
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The sea disturbs me. I have no phobia of it, and never have I been afraid of coming into contact with it and yet, whenever I’m near the sea, looking out over its blankness, I suddenly feel very aware, and wary, of its capabilities. Every time I start to fish, particularly on rough nights, I spare a few seconds to think of all those lost – those anglers that have fallen from cliffs or were pulled in by rogue waves. I think of them, and shiver slightly at the thought of walking out of my house, kissing my wife and daughter goodbye and disappearing forever, another number lost to the waters. To be aboard a boat means that trust is not only placed in the skipper, the engine and the integrity of the hull, but also on the sea itself and, much as I may love the sea, I have never trusted it. There is no negativity in this though, as I find that this adds a certain amount of intrigue, particularly in those places I tend to spend most of my time - where the land meets the sea.
Were you to come back in from the featureless grey expanse of the open sea and instead follow the British coastline, I mean really follow every mile, in a plane, then the eye would be drawn along a virtually unending chain of torn edges: the rough, rock-ripped coastlines of Wales, the craggy expanses of the West country’s Jurassic ledges, all those winding tatters of shingle stretching along the south coast around to Kent and so on. All frayed shreds indicating where an island that was once not an island had been ripped from its origins. Where there are straight lines there is plain fact and order, but where there is a ragged tag-end there is an unfinished story, the ongoing fragments of a narrative that bleeds in from the oceans and spins itself into the unravelled margins of our little island.
Webster’s English dictionary defines the word ‘margin’ as:
‘n. a border, edge’
And, although somewhat economic in its use of detail, this is beautifully adequate not only for the purpose of describing my angling mentality, but also for just about everything that surrounds it at this time of year.
It is midwinter. Imbolc or, more in keeping with our modern interpretation of faith, Candlemas, has only recently passed. Spring is both a distant memory and a tantalisingly longed-for near future. The worst of the freezing weather seems to be behind us, taking the first few steps of a grudging retreat. Temperatures have nudged ever so slightly upward and everywhere I look the world is starting to undergo its annual rehabilitation, going about the long business of remembering itself. The mini peach tree in the garden has led the way, the first to carry that extra tint of green, soon followed by the lavender and fuchsia. Everything lies limp and sodden like a cardboard food packet retrieved from the freezer, and one tentative foot is stepping toward spring, but as it is yet to make the first full leap of faith, we must be content for the moment to remain caught in a limbo somewhere between the frosts and the flowers.
Aside from the possibility of a spring run, the cod season is now almost over. The tight-knit group of anglers that forms the unofficial Brotherhood of the Cod disbands for the next six months and suddenly, many anglers find themselves cut free, dropped at the border of a strange country with the realisation that, for the time being at least, they have nowhere in particular to go and very little idea of how they are going to get there.
The big fish have all moved offshore to spawn; pickings are scant, limited to a few pin whiting and rockling. Almost unexpectedly, those overlooked tiddlers, the shoreline’s bit-part players, shuffle tentatively to centre stage, and we are forced to become less selective in our search for a fish, any fish.
In such circumstances anglers, particularly those who are not catching anything, can very quickly become the most haunted of people.
They are haunted by their angling present. Are they fishing the right spot? Have they lost their touch? Are they using the correct rigs and baits and hooks?
They are haunted by their angling past; not the failures, but the successes. These baits have all caught in the past, and these marks have all produced fish, so what’s different now?
Finally, they are haunted by their angling sessions yet to come. Future choices are doubted before they are even made; the paths that seemed so clear a month ago become confusing and directionless as the fog of uncertainty filters in.
I recall one such instance happening to me a few years back, as it nearly drove me to the outermost depths of despair. Through the best part of a month I couldn’t so much as buy a bite while those around me seemed to catch an endless stream of obliging fish – flounders, codling, whiting; the capture of each of these fish was, of course, laced with the altruistic concern of the fellow angler:
“Watch you don’t use up all your bait catching those fish, Si.”
“Bucket’s filling up nicely, mate.”
I tried everything from snood length to hook size to casting range and all the rig and sinker combinations in between, reducing myself to an overwrought wreck in the process. After much swearing, hours of soul searching, threats, exhortations and, finally, prayers, I gave up. I’d had enough. And then, out of nowhere, it happened. Or maybe I just stopped trying so hard and allowed it to happen. Either way, as things annoyingly tend to do, it all just clicked into place, as though everything were just one part of one great big plan I’d only just stumbled across.
I reeled in my rig ready to pull off the mushed remnants of the lugworm I’d been fishing with when it gave a little jump in my hands. In disbelief I opened my fingers and there, in the beam of my headlight, a tiny flounder flipped around, desperate to be released. I nearly kissed it but was interrupted by ironic cheers from my left.
“What is it, Si?” came the shouts.
“Angel fish!” I replied. Shooting a quick glance skywards, I could almost have believed it too.
Like I did back then, some will fish on regardless, blindly plugging away; others will simply give up, pack their gear away for a few months and practise their golf swing while they wait for the summer season to begin. These days I usually choose to sit on the fence, getting out as and when the mood takes me.
This lull in the quality of the available fishing does carry one positive, however, in the fact that it affords me the luxury of spending a little more time walking the valley that stretches away a few streets behind my home, to follow the river upstream for ten minutes before being presented with another choice.
I could take the left-hand path, like most others, and follow the pavement that loops up onto the main road before bending back inward to curve around the rear of Ynys Park. I could circumvent the perimeter of the football pitch to the left and the river to the right, carried along on the shining black flow of the tarmac path, past the concrete fishing platform, continuing behind the new ‘Copperminers’ development, named as a testament to the livelihoods pursued in this valley over the years, and before I knew it I would be washed up into the village of Cwmavon.
Alternatively, I could opt for the right-hand path, and a much rougher, more shadowy route that winds its way through the shade of alder and larch. The ground here hardly ever dries, retaining a plasticine elasticity in all but the driest weather, and descending into a gloopy quagmire in the wet. But this is the one worth following, for this is the way of concealment.
Track through the tunnel of trees, breathing in the earthy aroma of wet leaf litter, adjusting your eyes to the sudden burst of shade, and you will find that this path allows closer contact with the river, obscuring the watcher behind small earth banks and branches, and bringing them almost to within touching distance of some of its inhabitants.
Amongst my favourites are the family of goosanders. For around the last five years they’ve been coming here to nest, raise chicks and fish this same length of river, using the same rocks as water breaks to gather themselves out of the main flow, the little chicks pootling through the slack water like black and white puffballs. Most walkers, keen to get from one end of the track to the other, or striding after a bounding dog, most often miss them entirely.
At certain times, like now, such unconsidered details become significant, especially for anglers. Anything considered a moot point in the more plentiful summer and autumn seasons transforms into potentially key information and I, like many others, am forced to refer to the historical, reaching back into my journals.
These journals are a fairly recent addition to my angling routine. When younger I rarely had the time or the inclination to bother with such details when there were fish to be caught, but over the last dozen years or so I have come to realise the value of noting the tides, winds, barometric pressure, bait and even moon phases that accompany every session.
When I sit down and take the time to look through some of the entries, I am immediately transported away to other times, other nights and other fish. Of course, the first and most obvious features to jump out from the pages are the photographs.
It’s true that I am no Rembrandt with either brush or lens, but I am able to appreciate the value of a good image. Flicking through the pages of any issue of National Geographic, I can’t help but marvel sometimes when confronted with a fiery bird’s-eye view of a volcano, or a close-up of a tribesman on some dust plain, the care of all his life’s years etched into his face like old rain channels in a parched riverbed. But can a picture ever truly be worth a thousand words? Surely, this is too uneven a bargain?
I have seen some truly superb angling photographs over the years, scenes that really capture the moment perfectly - a cod held above the frozen airborne droplets of the creaming chocolate surf from which it’s just been pulled; the extreme close-up of a thornback ray’s eye that that reflects elements of the world it stares out upon, and gives it back as a strange, alien landscape. But despite the obvious visual appeal, they are still no more than a brief instant held forever still like a stopped clock, a moth pinned behind glass, forever separated from their life and essence.
If it’s this sense of life and essence that is needed, then it is to words that we must turn. All those verb tenses, the drive and direction of adverbs and the glorious adjectival facets impart to words a life that pictures simply cannot communicate.
Words don’t always need that tah-dah! flashiness to get the message across. Take the brilliant Hemingway micro story:
For Sale. Baby shoes, never worn.
Sometimes words can swiftly become far more than they seem; those moments when, like a dying star, they begin to carry a weight and significance disproportionate to their size. When this happens, they can hurt and heal; they have the power to revive, to recall, to open understanding and, most of all, to define and flesh out life’s minutiae and marginalia.
Just the other day, googling a plant I had noticed growing on a small patch of derelict ground turned up the name Goldenrod, a label I had heard before, yet it was still nice to put a name to the mental image I had of the plant. Now though, I was also armed with the knowledge that it also occasionally served as a tea, a good luck symbol and even a herbal remedy (should I ever need treatment for tuberculosis or a reduced flow of urine I shall know where to look).
But a little more reading immediately took me beyond the plant itself, the noun turning up Goldenrod as a colour. It’s there in the charts, I promise you; wedged somewhere in the middle of Mikado, Jonquil and Sunglow, as though Yellow were simply not enough to adequately describe sunrises, cornfields and everything that shimmers in between. Such a neat sideways sleight I thought to myself. No more than a slip of the brush bleeding across somebody’s palette that became another thing in itself, a pretty way around the heart of the matter. Apparently, it’s representative of success, prosperity and happiness, so perhaps I should tuck some down into a corner of my tackle box next time I head out.
All of which brings me back to these rudimentary jottings in my journal. In each description, in every word, there lies a hidden lode of memories conveying every event and unexpected occurrence, no matter how small, just waiting to be tapped into.
One perfect example of this is an entry for March 2006. I had always fished my local beach over the high-water period, following the tide up from the low water line as, traditionally, that was when it had always fished well for me. On this particular day though, an opening after five weeks without fishing meant that my only opportunity would be for a short session over the last of the ebb tide and the first of the flood.
The weather was windless and flat calm and, to top it all, this session would be fished in the doldrums of March, that sea angling dead zone where even the dabs have departed. It had disaster and blank written all over it, but three hours and a couple of dozen rockling, pin whiting and pouting later, I had enough material to fuel my late winter/early spring sessions for years to come. Due mainly to this lesson, I have learned to scribble down every minor little thing, no matter how scrappy or scant, as it is from such jottings that genuine discoveries are often made. As Arthur Conan Doyle put it: “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent”.
Looking back through the various sections over the years, I have begun to see how true this is, stumbling across many such forgotten gems like
‘Beach fished well on a NW wind compared to a blank last time on SW wind. 1 codling, a sole a bass and 3 small-eyed rays’
And the particularly fortuitous
‘Nothing until a miscast, sandeel bait dropped at 15 yards. Hit by 3lb 4oz bass’.
Subsequent entries showed that I was able to capitalise on this, catching eight bass over two pounds in two sessions by using the same tactics.
Flicking through these notes is like carrying out a conversation with myself, theses old sentences recalling to mind every fish and each decision that went into catching it. But the notes do not come from me. Each time I cast out a line, this is where the real conversation is opened, one in which I have no idea what will happen or what, if anything, will tune in through the surf’s white noise.
Just upriver from the estuary for instance, the mullet are usually ponderous in their response, considering for what seems an age any point offered to them, in total contrast to the smash-and-grab full stop of the bass or the usual affirmative double nod-nod of the codling. Some discussions are too long to be conducted quickly and need frequent refocusing, such as the elliptical rap-rap-rap a shoal of whiting offers when they are not so rudely interrupted by the curmudgeonly, insistent interferences of the occasional dogfish.
And sometimes, as now, there will be no response at all, and the rod tips will remain motionless. Perhaps I’ve been a little too vague, or maybe it’s time to go back to my notes, just to check one or two of those minor details. Never mind, I think it’s just one of those days – a little bit mint, a touch clary sage.
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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