Bailey True Tales from an Expert Fisherman

A Memoir of My Life with Rod and Reel
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60765-513-8
Verlag: IMM Lifestyle Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

This remarkable collection of personal fishing tales from around the world is the perfect gift for any angler whose aspirations take him or her beyond the riverbank. In ten hugely entertaining and well-illustrated fishing tales, internationally renowned author, photographer, and angler John Bailey recounts some of the best and worst aspects of his worldwide pursuit of fish. Bailey shares his horrifying brushes with espionage and death in the world's most remote and inhospitable places, and introduces readers along the way to a motley array of characters, as well as an immense variety of fish! Written with great energy, enthusiasm, and respect for the wild, True Tales from an Expert Fisherman is a singular record of one man's lifelong passion for fishing.

John Bailey is an internationally renowned author, photographer, and presenter of television programs on fishing and natural history. One of Britain's best-known anglers, he has also written numerous books, including John Bailey's Fishing Bible, also available from IMM Lifestyle Books. As a pioneering fishing trip tour leader, he has led anglers to some of the most remote corners of the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bailey, John

Leseproben

Chapter 1

John the Fish

I yearned to become a part of that world, to be with those fish, those great olive-backed tench as they sauntered down the avenues amidst the weed, across floors of polished sand, into their darkened rooms beneath the drapes of lilies.

Voices from that August day will never be stilled, not now. Voices fine-tuned by fear raking over the marsh. Forty years ago? It seems like an eternal yesterday. My parents tense, sensing the blade of panic cutting the sea wind. My father running toward the desperately waving figures. I followed, like a child does, eager to be in on the action, lagging a couple of paces behind to be on the periphery. Two women and a man standing above the sluices where the river runs to meet the sea. Pointing, shrieking—a rising tide in the agony of men that rips your chest apart. “My daughter. Oh, my God. My little girl . . .” A woman’s voice, sobbing. My father, a hero in the war, a hero still, strips and in a graceful, diving arc enters the pool. I watch him breasting the currents like a white otter. Amazement and a burst of hope stifling the pain hold the horror in suspension. My mother comforts the woman. I’m small, shy, and I recognize my father as successful, important, his advice sought everywhere. But here, for once, I knew he was wrong. “My little boy plays in the sink,” said my mother always, teasingly, and lovingly, and she was right. Almost since crawling, I’d been compelled to learn how water works, how it curls and creates its own world. Now I understood both the river beneath us and that my father was exhausting himself in the wrong place. The river and the tide were meeting at such a pace that anybody caught between would be lifted, then pushed down and trundled away from the pool. Too diffident to voice my instinctive knowledge, I slipped unnoticed through the reed beds and there, at the first bend, a golden-haired girl lay in the margins, dress rippling, face as though in sleep.

Tench were always my beloved, mysterious species.

I think I shouted. I’m told I was found in the water with her, pushing her back to the bank but in truth the rest of that day is remote. I seem to remember my father over her, breathing into her. I know she lived and that it was I who became the hero. The little unexpected hero. “How did you know . . . ?” “What you did . . .” “How can we ever . . . ?” What was important to me, though, was that never again did my mother laugh when she saw me on the stool by that sink. No longer was I “an odd little fish.” Henceforth, I was her “little fish” only, as though my strangeness were now accepted.

In truth, I’d always been aware my obsession had isolated me from the other children who were only interested in cars, trains, dolls, or war games in the schoolyard. That near-tragic day gave me a confidence and eased the nagging doubts I had about my own passions. All I’d ever wanted to do was to see more and more fish, glistening in the water, dancing in the waves, big fish, small fish. Colorful fish or fish that to the rest of the world might well seem drab but to me shone like the sun. Jam-jar fish at first, minnows, sticklebacks, and then gudgeon—nobody’s favorite fish but mine with those delicate, shifting glints of blue. The dart-like silver of the dace, another baby miracle in a magic world. Perch, beautifully barred. Roach, pearl-like silver. Carp, golden-scale clad. Pike, new-moon toothed and mottled menace. On and on, more and more fish, always seeking to complete a cosmic vision. It wasn’t the “twitcher” mentality obsessively ticking away at a list, it was something more than that and still is. More like a dabbling in wonderment.

Nose pressed to the bowl, watching my two wretched goldfish swim a miserable, circular life, agog at how they twisted, turned, hovered, and fanned those fabulous fins. An old sink outside in the garden, filled with murky water and mysterious fish . . . the weather loach that only came up before a thunderstorm and wriggled manically at the edges of the porcelain. What went on in that life during the endless months between? What could have been the signals that sparked in its little brain as the thunder began to roll? The baby tench that blew up bubbles every time I dropped in chopped garden worms and the eel that only moved at night, snaking out to engulf the tadpoles I had moved in from the farm pond. A sinister world but enthralling for all that, almost uniquely unknowable.

It was never a case of whether I wanted to go fishing or not, for if I wanted to see different types of fish, it was very often necessary to catch them. And, to be honest, I was compelled toward the sport so inexorably that I believe I’m a fisherman either because of genetics or reincarnation. My grandfather was an angler, quite famous in his day and because he died sixteen years before I was born, he obviously didn’t influence me directly. Genetically, though, who can tell? And once I was regressed by a throaty, floaty sort of woman enveloped in swirls of hazy purples and only held down to earth by lashings of golden jewelry. When I was in a trance—overcome by eyes, voice, and perfume—it emerged that I’d been a Highlander in a past life, during the eighteenth century when I’d gone away to fight and suffered a hideous death. Don’t try telling me there wasn’t a stream running through my glen and that I hadn’t winkled out a trout or two before going off to tackle the Sassenachs.

Worse, the path down to the lakes took me past the tramp’s cave, and I could never be sure whether he’d be there and come out at me in the half darkness as I hared for home.

The first years of my fishing life were grueling, any tiny success hard won. They were spent largely on a mean, oil-veneered canal on the outskirts of Manchester. The nasty, sharp grit of the towpath was forever in my knees or the palms of my hands after I’d fallen from my bike or been in a fight with any one of the innumerable gangs of tough lads that patrolled from one bridge to another. Boys’ tackle then was cheap and seemingly designed to frustrate you. Lines “birdnested” as if through a hideous black magic. Reels seized when it rained and froze in the snow. A whole cane rod had the delicacy of a yard brush. The winters were achingly miserable, feet frozen in thin Wellington boots while the anoraks of those days soaked up sleet like blotting paper. If you ever did hook a fish, chances were it would be as pale, as thin, and as sick as the rest of us. The first roach I ever caught turned out to be blind in not one but both eyes, which explains why it overlooked the awkward hook and gangly knot in the first place.

Even then, travel seemed to offer a way out and at a seemingly vast distance from my home lay the Roman Lakes, grubby but full of fish. This Eden, though, could only be reached by a twelve mile round trip, a trek for a six-year-old. Worse, the path down to the lakes took me past the tramp’s cave, and I could never be sure whether he’d be there and come out at me in the half darkness as I hared for home. I couldn’t know if he wished me harm but he looked grotesque and once he came so close to catching me, I could smell the staleness on his breath. Eventually, the paper reported that the police had found his body but I was never convinced. In fact, the walk home became worse after that because it was his ghost that chased me. I could hear his boots on the dark stones padding relentlessly through the merciless night.

In these early days what I liked most about fishing was reading about it. Bed and books. An apple and milk. Angling adventures far away in space and time. It wasn’t too hard to dream of better worlds holding waters with fish more than matchstick big. Endless images, unlimited possibilities. A Hampshire chalk stream running through lush water meadows dotted with willows, a church spire in the distance, and a lark overhead. No rough boys there; just huge, speckled trout lazily plopping at mayflies the size of parachutes. And then my parents did take me away to the sea. Many days they left me at a lake wondrously named Bayfield and possessing the halo of beauty I’d only ever dreamed of before. The toe of the lake almost always lay in wooded shade, even though it was high summer, but when I walked out into the poppy-strewn field, the sun was full glow onto it, lighting it up with glistening brightness. Standing behind some yellow flag irises, I peered in and for the very first time saw some truly huge fish for myself—real fish, not just drawings—living in another world, a parallel universe so close to mine I felt I could reach out and touch it. I yearned to become a part of that world, to be with those fish, those great olive-backed tench as they sauntered down the avenues amidst the weed, across floors of polished sand, into their darkened rooms beneath the drapes of lilies. I understood that those fish were beyond my powers to catch but that did not matter then and nor have similar failures ever done so since. Just watching them showed me that the world could be kind, that the books that had so long sustained me contained more than dreams but were truth itself. That morning was my defining moment in life, I suppose. You could say either that I’ve never grown up since or that I was mature then. I’d found my purpose and never once have I been tempted to deviate from it.

Back in Manchester, I tried to explain my discovery to Brian Socket, my closest friend, and to Margaret, who I’d loved absolutely for all the preceding term. It was all perhaps too heavy for playground banter and...