Chapter One.
The first session.
(That’s fishing session, not medication session.)
Tuesday, August 6th.
Day 1 of 10.
I’m standing away from the hustle and bustle of this holiday town, alone with rod in hand, on the end of a pier, or to be more precise it’s a granite breakwater. The noise of that hustle and bustle behind me is easily heard but more easily ignored. I shouldn’t really be here alone because I promised my wife that I wouldn’t stay far away from others, that was one of our agreements, but on the other hand I am wearing my self-inflating buoyancy aid. If something untoward did happen and I ended up in the sea then apparently the aid would position me with my face upwards so that I would be able to breathe even with a head injury that left me unconscious. There is even a handy loop on the back of the aid to allow the RNLI to hook me up into their boat, which is currently visible from where I am, only seventy-five metres behind me in the lifeboat station, so the volunteers could probably run the length of the breakwater to get to me quicker than they could launch their lifeboat. I haven’t tested the buoyancy aid but I put it on because I’d sort of intended to fish from the nearby rocks and admit the aid is just a bit over-the-top for pier fishing when that pier has a railing around it.
I could have fished from those rocks in front of me, the ones that sit alongside my pier, casting into its submerged rock, weed, and patches of sand hidden underwater, and looking very bassy, but I’m wary about being cut off by the tide, or falling and breaking a recently-found-to-be brittle bone area. This is, after all, my first evening’s fishing, straight after a long drive of two-hundred and fifty miles and I’ve been up since four this morning so I’m not exactly at my brightest. Instead, I decided that the pier was safer for now and I can send a belly-weighted, weedless, hooked lure over the rocky area mentioned to maybe search out a bass or even a pollock. (We often say an area looks bassy but never pollocky. Pollocky does not sound like a good thing. A load of bass is a school, but a load of pollocks is something entirely different.)
Opposite me, across the water of the harbour and at my back, is the famous Smeaton’s pier. On its outer end it has two anglers, with beach-casters and large, wire-spiked weights, so they have the ability to cast long distances into deep water of around thirty feet at high water. I say they’re on the end of Smeaton’s Pier. I am not jealous and instead I take pride in my light, eight-foot spinning rod, the box of lures in my bag, and my ability to move around to different places quickly, if needed. Fishing feels a little bit odd because my fishing partner, grandson Wil, who is elsewhere at the moment, not looking after me and doing his usual testing of footholds before allowing me to follow his footsteps, is absent and has always seemed to have been by my side.
Right now, the tide is flooding and is the highest tide for a month, the sun is due to set around nine this evening, so we are approaching perfect conditions for bass fishing, and at six-thirty it’s maybe less than an hour off high tide. With these conditions present, there is no way that I, tired as I am, could have gone to my accommodation and sat there thinking about starting to fish on the following day.
I watch another weight accompanied by a probably smelly bait as it’s cast way out from Smeaton’s Pier, while I scan the top of the water between there and my position with my polarised-lens, prescription sunglasses and notice the water start to boil with bait fish and maybe sand eel but on the opposite side of the pier to the rocky side where I’ve been fishing. This is why anglers are continually looking around. I’m fishing one side of the breakwater and it seems that the fishing is all on the other side.
I know from many previous visits to St. Ives, Cornwall, going all the way back to nineteen sixty-three, that the seemingly boiling water is over a sandbank near the harbour entrance, where on an incoming tide, children play while the water comes in around them and they revel in the fact that they have to wade to reach the safety of the harbour.
Think like a fish I say out loud. Always and at all times think like a fish. A shoal of school bass, or if I’m honest, more likely a shoal of mackerel, have driven bait fish inwards towards the harbour, acting like dolphins ambushing their prey, but undoubtedly with less organisation. The baitfish reach the sandbar and are forced upwards over it, so have to become more compact in the shallower water, more easily eaten, and for them, jumping out of the water seems to be a safer bet than being gorged by mackerel in a feeding frenzy.
My bet, because the boiling water covers such a large area, is on it being mackerel, who usually shoal in huge numbers. I’m here, alone, in Cornwall, for ten days, that’s ten single breakfasts needed, and so my lure is quickly unclipped from my fluorocarbon leader and four feathers are clipped on with a one-and-a-half-ounce weight below them. Yes folks, this is Britain where we went half metric to confuse ourselves. My fishing weight, always described in ounces, is one and a half ounces equating to roughly forty-two grams which just about suits my light fifteen-to-forty-gram rod. (We also buy petrol in litres and talk about our cars doing so many miles to the gallon!)
I am aware that some anglers fish a weighted, hooked lure at the bottom of their feathers, rather than a weight, but I worry that my extremely light rod may not take five mackerel, fighting in different directions at the same time. The first cast catches fish and I delight not only in the catch but in the fact that my theory was correct.
One Joey mackerel is too small and goes back into the sea to grow and is released by not touching him but by shaking him off the single hook, the other one is over the regulation twelve inches and is despatched and placed in my fold-up catch-bag ready for breakfast tomorrow. Mackerel fillet on toast with thick butter between the two - the thought makes my mouth water.
Soon the mackerel are coming out in twos and threes, each fighting in different directions, nullifying their fight and making it easier to bring them in through pure muscle power. Have I mentioned that I have little muscle power now? Maybe I’ll get around to that later, no time now because the mackerel could go away at any minute.
The shoal must have pushed the sand eel or bait fish into the bay and this bottle-neck between the main pier and my minor breakwater, is pushing them further into St. Ives harbour, making them easier for the mackerel to gorge on.
Looking around, always looking around for fishing information, I notice that the holiday makers on The Wharf Road on the harbour’s edge are scurrying about as if they are in a shoal, looking for food and in their own feeding frenzy, all looking for a restaurant that isn’t full, some heading for Fore Street where their shoal will become too compact, outnumbering the number of tables available. Some holiday makers though are giving up and settling for the easy option of takeaway pizza. This is what bass do. They look for the best sit-down meal but if they see the easy option, my lure, they will take it as second best. That is the theory anyway.
Most pizza comes from the posh pizza wagon at the town end of the West Pier, the pier that I’m on, with most folk then taking their boxed food back to their holiday accommodation. Some though are eating on the pier, enjoying the warm August evening, and I notice a young woman, resting on the railing, looking down into the water, picking off pieces of her pizza crust and throwing them in. Mullet? Something to investigate at another time perhaps. For now, I am a hunter-gatherer and need to eat breakfasts. I am aware that a mackerel shoal like this will not come in every night so I have to gather my ten breakfasts in one go.
Hook-ups start to tail off and once ten mackerel of legal size have been dispatched, I stop. The beach-casters are still pushing baits far out into the bay and appear not to have noticed me or the mackerel shoal, but then I’ve been too preoccupied to notice anything they may have caught. I’m sure that even if they hadn’t wanted to catch mackerel for food, like me, they still would have wanted to top up their bait store with this oily fish. Maybe though they too are on holiday and lack a freezer to freeze down mackerel for use as bait at a later date. What to do now?
The weight and feathers come off and on goes a solid-bodied, top-water but shallow-diving lure, these sharp-toothed fish are not going to ruin my soft plastic lures or bite their tails off. The lure is a subtle mackerel colour on the top, but crucially, bright, pearly white underneath to stand out hopefully in the oncoming dusk. It also has metal beads inside it to draw attention as it dives as the clear-plastic front lip forces it downwards on my retrieve.
I stop reeling in and the lure floats upwards and then I jerk to make it dive quicker on the next reel in. Variety of movement is the name of the game. I cast to where I think the shoal was previously at its most populous, before bites became more obscure and where a large mackerel may fancy eating a smaller cousin. My hope is that a large mackerel has gorged itself on sand-eels and is now resting but will still be forced to follow my lure when he sees it, feels its movement with its lateral line, and knows my lure is just too good to resist.
On the YouTube videos, where I re-learned about modern fishing methods, the presenter always knows the model and maker of the lure, names it, and adds that they are not sponsored by the manufacturer. I wonder if this is in the hope of receiving a box of lures so that they are sponsored? It’s not something that I can always do, and cannot in this instance, because as soon as the lure was out of the packet, and the packet discarded, its name disappeared into the ether. My theory is that I choose a lure to do the job I believe it is capable of doing, not because of its name or its manufacturer. There are exceptions but I’ll get to those at another time.
My lure is hit on the second cast, the trebles having been changed to two single hooks (5), and either the underbelly hook, or the tail hook, seems to be well bedded in. Immediately, fishing becomes a whole new experience as all goes quiet around me, the hubbub of the town disappears completely and my only sense is that connection coming to me through my tight braid that is bending my rod. Gone is the ancient hunter-gatherer feeling of obtaining food at all costs and my head is now filled with sport. My feet are firmly planted on the Cornish granite rock pier, but my head is transported to a Welsh river, with nobody around me for miles, and it’s me against the wily trout on the end of my line that has taken my fly. My rod is now part of me and held high. It bends nearly double and shakes vigorously as the mackerel tries to free itself and I only reel in when I am able to and so that the line or the rod don’t snap. Did I tie that knot tightly enough? Is my line of sufficient breaking strain? Has there been any wear to my line? This is what a single mackerel, on a single lure, on light gear, can do to an angler’s head.
Unfettered by other mackerel with their need to escape in different directions, this loner can move wherever he wants to, can zig and zag across the water and is clearly not in the mood to give in yet as the braid cuts through the water leaving marks on the surface. Braid spools off my fixed-spool reel, and I allow it to happen without tightening the drag because this lad needs to tire himself out a bit against the bend of the full length of my rod before any attempts to land him.
When he pauses, or swims towards me, I raise my rod higher and then wind like hell on the rod’s descent and eventually he tires before I do (just) and comes within distance of my hand on my line so that I can hand-ball this tired-out fish up onto the pier. He deserves the privilege of a landing net really after that fight, and if I’d been on the rocks he would have had that privilege. I unhook him, thank him for the fight, and allow him back to his shoal.
He was bigger than any fish taken on my feathers, but I stopped when I had enough food for breakfasts and although I love mackerel breakfasts, having one for an evening meal as well would be a bit extreme. My Fitbit tells me that my pulse is a hundred and fifteen, so from experience, I sit down on my granite floor and breathe deeply until the Fitbit numbers come back down into the seventies. Maybe it’s one of my famous hot flushes, caused by my hormone treatment, or maybe it’s just the excitement of the mackerel chase, but my forehead and neck are beaded with sweat and I wonder what a bigger fish could do to me if this is the result that a single mackerel can achieve.
As my heart gradually slows, I revel in the fact that I do not, like some, get carried away with a mackerel shoal and keep taking and taking beyond my means. I have my breakfasts, I’ve had my sport, and the shoal needs to replenish so we are all happy.
I think my fighter tells his mates that it’s all a trap, because the fishing slackens off dramatically at the tide’s full height. I’m tired after a long day of travel and I’m too tired to fish the tide back down, so it’s time to go back to my one-person holiday let that my wife booked for me. She won’t be there to clean the fish, a job that she does much better than I can, she is on her way to Greece with the rest of my family, including my single parent daughter and two grandchildren, but that’s a story for another time, maybe in the next chapter. Okay, definitely in the next chapter. I know because I’ve already read it.
After filleting ten fish, I’m left with more waste that I have fillets, so I bag the waste up and leave my humble and temporary abode. I could of course dump this bag into a waste bin and thereby drive any early morning seagull’s mad tomorrow with their inability to get to the meal that they can smell, but instead I return to my fishing spot. It’s dark now, too dark for any seagulls to be feeding, and the tide is ebbing. My bag of offal and bones is emptied into the water, to be eaten by other fish, crabs, lobsters, or maybe a young conger eel, and I’m sure it will all go back into the circle of life. The dirty, blood-stained carrier bag though is discarded into the general waste bin on the Wharf Road.
If I had one criticism of this beautiful area, it would be that the bins are nearly all ‘general waste.’ Being from Wales (2nd in the league table of world countries for recycling), I have become accustomed to dividing all waste between separate waste bins and leaving a small amount of general waste to be collected once every three weeks. Having witnessed though the chaos caused by bin lorries in narrow streets on bin day here in St. Ives, I guess that separate lorries would cause even more chaos. There are one or two bins for combined plastic and cans but it seems to me to be a token gesture. Is this a case of modern methods trying to be inflicted on a town plan that was constructed before cars and lorries were a thing?
Back at the holiday let again, with washed hands, four sets of fillets go into the fridge compartment and the other six into the freezer section. The plan is that as each breakfast is consumed, a backup fillet will move from the freezer to the fridge part, to defrost slowly to be used in four days’ time. That’s the theory anyway.
My hands thoroughly washed again, the plan is to shower before going to bed. I know I’m not desperate for sleep because I twice had a one-hour power nap in motorway service stations on my travel down here. That is why it is a surprise to wake the following morning, fully clothed, lying on top of the bed and not even having closed the curtains. I’m only a little confused about where I am because a flock of seagulls seems noisily intent on letting me know that I am on the coast and another day of fishing awaits me.
