The riverbank is life’s classroom
‘IASK a simple question, the truth I only wish; Are all fishermen liars and do all the liars fish?” This witty ditty hanging in the bar of a venerable Kerry hotel says a mouthful about the noble art of angling.
More than any sport or activity, the simple act of dropping a line upon water allows for the greatest possible combination of skill, technique and deception available to the human race. Whether you’re a 10-year-old kid dangling a piece of string from a your grandad’s walking stick into a muddy garden pool or an international financier paying megabucks for the pleasure of casting a line across the shimmering waters of the Moy or Blackwater rivers, most fishing folk answer to the same universal characteristic: an all-consuming desire to escape from the hurly burly of everyday life to engage in combat with an unseen opponent brimming with guile and cunning.
Like thousands out there, I’ve got all the kit – fancy wellies, snazzy outfit, nifty rod – but am destined to always return home with an empty creel. Samuel Johnson wasn’t that wide of the mark with his observation: “Angling I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.”
On the bank of a river, there are no fail-safe rules for success, only the world’s greatest optimists in search of the world’s most slippery holy grail.
Right from the first time we stand knee-high to our fathers in the rush of a fast-flowing current, watching his perfect cast drift elegantly across the rippling surface, a fisherman learns very early on that this is no mere tussle with a foe who calls the deep his home, but a solitary odyssey, where comfort and ease will usually come second place to patience and frustration.
My father and older brother were the experts, while I, always the plugger, more prone to tangles than the perfect cast, was happy to sit in rapt observation as those gentle hours formed the treasured memories of later life.
The riverbank is a classroom for life, where over-confidence due to occasional success is usually punished by an opponent who lies waiting to remind us who is the master in this endless game.
No matter how much you spend or how far you travel, the simple act of dropping a fly on the water will always be a contest where the scales, so to speak, are weighted heavily in favour of your foe.
And yet we persevere, casting our lines more in hope than expectation that today will be the day when everything changes.
But at the back of our minds, perhaps all anglers are secretly heedful to the words of Henry Thoreau: “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”