Well seeing as how y'all enjoyed b*tch-creek so much, and so as not to give too much away from the new book before it gets onto the streets, here is an old one from my last book, "A MEAN-MOUTHED, HOOK-JAWED, BAD-NEWS, SON-OF-A-FISH (which incidentaly IS available from Gonzo Fish'n Books and from better book stores everywhere ~ if they aint got it in stock they can order it)
PART ONE THE POLITICS OF FORTUNE
by Surly Ghillie
I have always been a lucky fisherman. Truly. Perhaps my clearest memory of childhood
concerns that wondrous day when first I went fishing. Not just bent-pin-and-pole stuff, but
real fishing. It was back in 1954 or 1955 and I was almost all of five years old. In those balmy,
far-off days, inflation was something you did to tyres. Mangroves still grew in Durban Bay, and
Maydon Wharf, with its train tracks and buttress cranes, was like a finger on the pulse of the
Indian Ocean with its awesome oily swells.
It was high summer, probably just past Christmas, for I came to be standing on the wharf with
a brand-new pistol-grip glass rod in my hand, equipped as I recall, with a crude centre-spool
reel over-wound with fifty or sixty yards of stiff and brittle line. My trace was simple,
consisting of no more than a ball sinker running between two knots and a straight, stainless 1/0
hook baited with a blob of bacon purloined from the pantry. The wharf was lined along its
entire length with burly fishermen wielding massive surf-casting rods. Their array of tackle
dazzled me: Scarborough reels, burnished black by leather thumb brakes, and fancy multiplying
reels; Penn 49s and the like. How I envied them, with canvas tackle bags and razor-honed bait
knives, and their incredible casts, sending whole pilchards in high-looping parabolas to land in
silent, far-off splashes, where surely all the big fish swam.
My ears still sting at the memory of their laughter as I elbowed through to the jetty edge,
planning an attempt, with a four-foot six-inch flipping stick and bacon blob, to emulate their
casting. I whipped my rod through some 450 degrees, praying as I released the line that my
cast might be a thing of beauty. It started well enough, with the line snaking smoothly out
behind an accelerating trace. As the bait reached its zenith way out over the dark water, I
jammed the cast and the bait zapped back towards the wharf. It hit the concrete with a
sticky sound, before dribbling into the water at my feet. The mirth around me doubled as the
grown men cracked up at the spectacle. With crimson ears and flushed hot, I turned my back
and plucked ineffectually at the bird's nest on my reel.
Suddenly an unseen force almost tore the rod from my grip. Clamping for all I was worth on
the bucking rod, I was pulled off balance and fell perilously close to the edge. Scrambling to my
feet with the rod bent double and the reel still solidly jammed, there was little I could do
except to cling to the rod for dear life.
There is much that the intervening years have blurred, but the memory of that day has stayed
with me always. Intervention of divine providence, in the form of a by standing angler,
eventually brought a spotted grunter (Pomadasys commersonnii) of seven or eight pounds to my
feet. But that's not all. In the excitement, not one of the surrounding throng noticed that
from the fish's mouth hung a thin telltale line. A tug was resisted by a weight far greater than
I could deal with and it was left to my benefactor to pull a superb surfcaster and Penn reel
from the oily water. My spotted grunter had been towing the rig along behind him for ***
knows how long, while waiting only for my bacon to come along.
And so it came to pass that my very first cast delivered not only a fish of sufficient size to
silence the playful mirth of a dockful of fishermen, but also the means and motivation to
pursue further the gentle art of ichthyoangamy. That day was merely a precursor to the
chronology of events that over the years has served to confirm my early assessment. Yes, I am
a lucky fisherman, to a degree that borders upon the supernatural. Hark back, for instance, to
1963. It was a good year. My family had moved to the Eastern Cape and we lived on a
ramshackle farm a short spit from Leaches Bay. That summer long I virtually lived on the
beach, spending every waking hour in the surfline between Leaches Bay and Kidd's Beach. I
would walk for hours, exploring every rock-pool and gully, occasionally happening upon some
small bay or other, seemingly cut off from the world of men in its remoteness. I studied this
world and its denizens with a vigour and single-mindedness that entirely eluded me in the
classroom. I took that to be a clear sign of divine intention that I should spend more time in the littoral and less with my schoolbooks. With crude but serviceable tackle, I threw redbait and mussels, crayfish tails and fish fillets. And when I had no bait, I tossed spinners, spoons and plugs. From the gullies I took blacktail, grey chub and galjoen, and from the sandy bays I
pulled steenbras, cob and sharks. Beyond the breaker line I searched for musselcracker,
yellowtail and leervis, fishing in fair weather and foul. Finally, with my biorhythms synched to
the east wind and with the tides for my calendar, I confronted eyeball-to-eyeball the grail of
angling lore.
Providence. Plain and simple. I say it again with no trace of levity. You see, that entire
glorious year spent fishing an as yet unspoilt coastline left me with no keepsake dearer than
the memory of the day I went fishing with Basil. Basil was my own age, the son of a neighbour
and a regular ruffian. In the manner of boys, we pitted our skills against each other and
before too long it became evident that Basil had the better of me at most things, from running
to rugby to arm-wrestling. As we set out with our fishing poles, he made it clear that here too
he meant to whip my ass.
Now Basil had been born there and in his thirteen-odd years had done some pretty serious
fishing, so his confidence seemed not at all misplaced. We walked along the beach in the false
dawn until the rising sun found us in a little sandy bay not far from the mouth of Hickman's
River. Basil, very much the senior partner, determined that this was to be our fishing spot. In
short time we baited up and I stood back as Basil unleashed a majestic cast, his pencil of
redbait landing almost 100 yards out in the mouth of our horseshoe bay. Then it was my turn.
The bay shelved steeply and the force of the shore break meant that one had to cast from up
on the beach. I stood back about fifteen yards from the waters' receding edge and let fly
with my cast, mustering all the power I could. True to form, the cast began auspiciously, rising
high and true in the air. Then my over-revving reel caught up with itself and the cast jammed
solid. Back zipped the bait in a wild cartwheel that ended up on the beach just shy of the
water. Blanketed by Basil's unfettered derision, I watched as the powerful shore break
surged over my sorry bait and contemplated the 100 yards of overwind nesting on my reel.
Backwash tugged at the line as the wave receded until the bait lay high and dry once again. A
second wave broke and the surging water again pulled at the line. But this time the resistance
increased until the rod tip dipped as if some flotsam had snagged against the trace. I pulled to
free it and merry hell broke loose.
In the calf-deep water my line went berserk, zigzagging this way and that. With the reel less
than useless, I had few options, so I turned my back on the waves and ran up the sand dunes,
towing a furious, flopping fish in my wake. Old Basil's guffaws vanished as I hoisted a
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