Gone Fishin'

With the purchase of my land came the right to fish in the small river it borders. Being a tributary of the River Dovey, a well-known sea trout and salmon river, it seems reasonable to expect a few of them to hang a right on reaching the junction and come swimming past my banks.  This assumption is lent weight by the fact that the Prince Albert Angling Society owns fishing rights a bit further upstream. 

I find it odd that the act of luring a fish to its death should so blandly be termed “fishing”. People don't go “deer-ing”, “fox-ing” or “rabbit-ing”; in the 19th century wealthy colonial types didn't spend time in Africa “big game-ing”. No, hunting and shooting nicely sums up these activities. It seems unfair to fish to name the art of destroying them after themselves, and unfair also to those who simply want to go and observe them or even swim with them – why can't these more benign pursuits be called “fishing”? So here and now I propose that we change the term to “fish-hunting” and be done with it. I am sure it will catch on.

So I have the right to fish-hunt along a 400m stretch of river. What fun to be had! I had never before been fish-hunting but the primal glamour suddenly appealed. I would pop down there before supper and land myself a 4lb trout, gut it, grill it and have it with new potatoes and foraged sauteed nettles. Hardly any need to go food shopping at all.

Even before arriving on the land I had bought my “spinning” rod, the type that is supposed to emulate a darting small fish and which is purportedly easier to use than a “fly-fishing” rod which mimics, well, a fly. I had paid for my fish-hunting license, allowing me to catch as many trout and salmon as I like between 20 March and 17 October. I had had a couple of lessons from a gruff northerner at Pilsdon in a field in which I managed to catch the hedge. I was all set.

The reality began to dawn pretty quickly. Firstly, the river is about five metres down below the bank and there are only a couple of places where you can just about scramble down, and hope you can scramble up again. Secondly I learned that fish only bother to come up this river when it's in speight, i.e. after a downpour so the river is running faster and deeper than its usual shallow self. Thirdly, the opposite bank is only five or six metres away with branches hanging everywhere so it is perilously easy to get the bait stuck high up in a tree before it even reaches the water.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, I have on several occasions these past months put on my fish-hunting gear and strode off to catch myself a whopper. The other day it was even the right conditions for it. But whoever claims that fish-hunting is calming or pleasurable in some way is clearly doing something different. Catching a blinking fish, for instance. I have learned to count it a success if after several minutes I haven't got the hook caught on some twig or rock, or got the line horribly tangled somehow around the reel. After the last session where I caught just two wet leaves, I was still glad that I hadn't lost the spinning bait and for once hadn't let my mounting irritation get the better of me and stormed back vowing to leave the fish forever be.

But I think this season at least, the local trout have little to fear passing by my land.