Tales from the bank

I'm off fishing for a few hours.
In one of the earlier blogs I mentioned how fishing has this power to make you keep trying, to keep returning to the water, just in the vain hope that today may be your day.

Since I caught that little fish way back in early March I have been fishing about another 6 times, and I'm ashamed to say, I'm yet to add to my tally.

The nearest I got was last week, when whilst on the bank staring at my float with raw eyes, a young lad came up to me with a fair size fish in his hand. He had picked it out of the water!

Here I am with some of the latest fishing methods on the circuit, tooled up with the fanciest baits, fleece lined and ready to catch, and some Tarzan wannabee from an estate in Oldham hand picks the biggest fish from the margins and brings it over to me.

There is something quite intimidating about wild 11 year olds.

'Do you want this fish mate?' he enquires whilst holding a rather miserable blood covered fish
.
'Er no thank you, don't you think that fish should be in the water?' I replied trying my hardest to be an adult.

'Dunt matter mate, its dead now' he told me whilst hurling the dead fish straight into the area where I was fishing.

He legged it.

I sat on my fishing box, watching the said fish on the surface of the water next to my float. It wasn't dead, there were still a few shallow breaths, a few gasps of life left to be had. I looked at the culprit who was now doing a live autopsy on a rather aroused male frog, and I wondered if nature had just tipped upside down, and that it had got it all wrong.

Well after feeding my fishing area with a delectable variety of offerings including sweetcorn, powdered bread, pork luncheon meat, Pepperami (fishing mag tip), boilies, two types of pellets (one heavily flavoured) and bird seed, all without producing a single fish, I could hardly imagine the fish would be heading for my area, just waiting to dine in luxury with one of their own suffocating on its last fins, floating around them in the clutches of death whilst they eat off my menu.

I packed up in disgust, a weird mixture of sadness and frustration for not catching a fish, the emotion of watching a fish dying in front of me, and also, whilst I'm enjoying all other personal connections with nature and wildlife I'm having here, the inner turmoil and guilt knowing that one day, I'm hopefully going to tow a fish across a pond with a lump of very sharp metal hooked in its lip, the perfect way to look nature in the eye!

Fishing is a hunting tool, yet we have turned in to leisure and pleasure, a sport!
I go again, to sit by the pond, and ponder.