PART 2
The years roll on and though they have not always treated me gently, I am dogged, in matters
piscatorial, by the same dumb luck with which I had made so early an acquaintance. Perhaps my
birth sign is the coelacanth, perhaps it is my chemistry that has a vestigial affinity with slime,
scale and fin. Certainly my benefaction is specific to fish and fishing. Spin a coin ten times
over and I will call heads or tails and be wrong every time. For me to wager on a horse is
sufficient to guarantee that the poor beast will break a leg, go blind or suffer some equal
calamity. Make me a gift of some bond or stock and the company will be marked for liquidation.
But give me a hook, some line and a piece of water, fresh or briny, and all will be well with me.
Consider this story. There was a time, once, when I was 30 kilometres out of Cape Point in as
fine a skiboat as ever braved the open sea. The year was 1973 and summer was coming to an
end. My companion for the day was a Mr Baines and we were fishing for tuna, yellowfin and
longfin. We found no yellowfins that day, but by noon we had been through a number of
fast-moving schools of longfin, hooking and boating a good share of them. My satisfaction,
however, was unreplete. I yearned for a hard pull against a big yellow. Suddenly the radio
crackled news from a position about six miles to our east. Boats were converging over a dense
concentration of baitfish and tuna. We upped lines, turned and ran on the compass at full
throttle until a vast flock of diving seabirds on the horizon drew us to the centre of the action.
And what action it was: all around were concentrations of birds, schools of porpoises, sharks
and gamefish, and a pod of orca, fifty-odd strong. The predators were holding a huge shoal of
baitfish at the surface and everything with a mouth and teeth was tearing at them with
a frenzy that I have never seen equalled. An armada of boats had gathered in an area of
perhaps seventy acres, each trolling a full complement of lines to every point on the compass.
It was unadulterated chaos. A number of collisions were narrowly avoided as tempers frayed
and temperatures soared. Frenzy-seared curses added to the clamour. In no time we had our
lines out and were leaping towards screaming reels. Now Mr Baines was, and perhaps still is,
a complete gentleman, one for whom the play was the entire issue. Not for him the butchery of
maximum drag or winching tactics. Oh no! He set his drag at minimum and gave his fish its head.
Never mind that all four rods on the boat were into fish. Never mind the unspeakable orgy of
anglers, lines and colliding forces around us. He was there for the sport and would not be
gainsaid. He settled back to see how many lines his fish could weave through as it tore through
the maelstrom. The water was as clear as only oceanic waters can be and in pockets where the
shoal parted one could easily pick out details fifty yards or more below the boat. Eventually Mr
Baines was prevailed upon to tighten his drag somewhat and apply a couple of cranks to his reel
handle, but by now the spectacular antics of his fish, way below the press on the surface, had
drawn the personal attention of every ***dam killer whale in sonic range. I watched as in the
cerulean depths about a dozen or so orcas encircled the thrashing tuna on Mr Baines's line.
The fish saw the killers and in pure terror, spurted for the safety of our boat bottom. About
ten yards short of its goal, the leading whale caught up with the tuna and gently breathed him
in. The killer whale paused for a moment and through the gin clear water our eyes met, and I
swear, he winked at me. Now I do not recall precisely if I winked back, but I do recall the
splendour of its dentition and I do recall the image it awakened before my eyes. And this is
what I saw: I saw that whale, hanging tail up from a gantry on the dockside. I saw headlines
emblazoned around the capitals of the world. I saw flashbulbs popping as we lounged on the
decks of my twenty-two-foot skiboat, explaining to a phalanx of media persons how we had
landed our fifteen-yard multi-ton prize. Mr Baines, however, was far too absorbed in the
finer points of gentlemanly elegance to have noticed the rapidly developing events in which
he was destined to play so pivotal a part. He continued to toy with what he imagined to be no
more than a brave fish. I, on the other hand, all the while looking that whale straight in the eye
and with knuckles white upon the wheel, gunned the twin seventy-horse outboards and
screamed at Mr Baines:"Strike! Now, strike!"
Using the motors to set the hook is a well-established and highly effective technique with
big-fish anglers and I had every confidence in success. The boat leapt forward until the whale
gave a playful twitch to his tail. We came to an abrupt halt and the starboard gunwale
disappeared for a few moments into the water. We popped back up and I steadied the boat as
its decks drained. This was fishing and I was starting to enjoy myself.
"Cut the line! Cut the line!" trilled my gentleman companion in a falsetto that would have done
quite nicely for a lead soprano in the Drakensberg Boys' Choir. I dived for the knife and
scooped it to the other end of the boat, beyond the frantic clawing fingers of our Mr Baines.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the next few moments absorbed my entire being as I fought
the whale using the boat, without the benefit of reel or rod.
"Cut the line, you freaking crazy son of a she sea-dog," spluttered the gentlemanly Mr Baines.
I think I might have detected a whiff of girlish hysteria in his voice as he tried to bite
through the 130-pound test Dacron. The boat bobbed at the end of its whale and time stood
still. I scooped a bucket of water one-handed over the smoking reel, then reached for the
short gaff.
Suddenly the whole boat juddered and the Dacron parted with a sound like a pistol shot. Mr
Baines slumped back in the fighting chair, shivering uncontrollably and swivelling his eyes
in their sockets, which seemed a trifle weird as the day was not in the least chilly. I was
disconsolate, aghast. How could my luck suddenly turn so cruel, curdle so completely? It was
simply not possible, for I had counted that whale as caught.
Now, I am not one to hold a
grudge, but I must admit that as I numbly brought us back to the harbour, my unkind thoughts
centred firmly on my gentlemanly crew member. I held him entirely and criminally responsible
for the loss of our prize, which I knew, fate had marked for me. And then it struck me.
Perhaps Mr Baines was not entirely at fault. The proven caratage of my fishing fortune was not
in the least devalued. After all, that whale escaped on a technicality. He was a ***dam
mammal, not a fish at all, and his capture fell outside the ambit of fishing. To test this thesis I
turned away from the complexity of all my tackle, the boat rods, surf reels, swivels, sinkers
and down riggers. I put them all away and immersed myself in the simplicity and purity of
fly-fishing. The intervening years have been full. I answered the call of ecology and sought my
meat in entomology. I have roamed the courses of a hundred rivers and encircled a thousand
lakes and estuaries. I am a master of snap casts, roll casts, haul casts and steeple casts. With
a two-weight line in a twenty knot wind I can lay figures of eight between a willow's branches.
I know thirty seven ways to calm a spooked trout and can identify, and tie, no fewer than 461
species of woolly-worm, and can tell to the hour when Trichoptera will hatch or Odonata
migrate.
Yet all this is as nothing when compared with my single and prime principal. I give it free and
tell it true. The only indispensable item in a fisherman's orbit is L_U_C_K.
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