Fishing

 First published on 17 April, 1991. I think this is the original piece on this idea: I used it more than once in various permutations. 

We used to be able to get into our car without having a fishing rod poke us in the ear, or a fishhook catch us up the nostril. The car never smelt superfresh, but now it smells of super fish, what with tackle boxes, buckets and nets.

We used to be able to go to the freezer, take our an icecream container and be sure of finding icecream in it. Not anymore. It’s just as likely to contain dozens of sprats, bait for future salmon.

I used to expect, quite reasonably, to see earrings dangling from my wife’s ears. Now I’m just as likely to see a couple of swivels, the little coupling devices that allow the hook to turn freely.

Since I wrote about hobbies some time ago, my wife has got into fishing – not in a big way, really, but enough to encourage her to go out at any opportunity. Beats watching idiotic sit-coms on the telly.

I suppose I should have read the signs, considering who her forebears were. She comes from English Norfolk stock – a true Norfolk broad – and was brought up on the coast, where fishermen are two a penny, and winkles, mussels and crabs part of the regular diet.

By a curious set of circumstances, I’d sown the seed by getting a fishing magazine sent to me each month. And in the Christmas holidays I picked up a booklet in Whitcoulls about taking kids fishing. I really only wanted it for research – honest I did.

She requested an early birthday present, and we bought our first fishing rod. I say ‘our’ because supposedly it was for all the family, but it soon became my wife’s alone. Then she found it wasn’t big enough to catch salmon, so 1992’s birthday came early too. (No wonder I’m so hard up.)

Before my wife got into fishing, I used to think fishermen were a pretty taciturn lot, reminiscing about the last catch and brooding about the next. Both my wife and I have been pleasantly surprising to find that, in Dunedin at least, this isn’t the case. (Though I hear that  up north, the fishing etiquette of former days is going the way of all other etiquette, with people tossed into the water if they tread on someone else’s fishing space.)

In spite of being a novice, my wife has made the wharf her second home. And instead of being ignored by the more experienced fishermen, she’s been helped again and again.

When her hook caught round one of the wharf supports, taking a length of line and the float with it, her first reaction was to be a bit peeved and go off and buy another float.

On returning, one of her fellow fishermen asked why she’d bothered. At low tide he used his net to catch hold of the float and pull the rest of the line up, with the sprat that had been bait still attached.

When she caught her first salmon, one of the fishermen was there with his net to hoist it up out of the water for her. (She’s caught two salmon in her short time of fishing, including one just after the recent weekend competition. We might survive the recession yet.)

Someone else told her how to gut the salmon after scaling it, preferably under running water; how to remove the head properly, particularly since by the lack of a dorsal fin it could be seen as a tagged specimen; where to take the head for recording; and how to tell the sex by the shape of the mouth; the male has more of a hook on the lower lip.

She’s been really encouraged by the support she’s received down at the wharf. My only concern is that she’s now got her eye on a fishing trawler.

Salmon statue, Rakaia, New Zealand
Courtesy of Michal Klajban

The first fishing magazine had been sent to me for research into what sort of articles they were looking for. For some reason the following issues just kept turning up – for free.

My wife did most of her fishing off the wharf on the Harbour. Salmon were in good supply because the smolt were released each year, the salmon went up the Leith Stream, and came back to the Harbour when mature.

A slightly expanded version of this column appears here.