LOOK AND LEARN
Even the clueless can appear like experts in the eyes of others
There I was concentrating on my fishing when I heard a voice: “You look like an expert, I wonder if you could help me?”
For a moment I thought the man in a wet suit standing next to me must be speaking to someone else, possibly someone in the sea, because I was the only person, other than my son, standing on the long, natural stone pier of rocks stretching out into the bay.
Realising the oddly-dressed character was indeed engaging me in conversation, it also dawned on me that he was the same bather who I had been watching a few minutes beforehand splashing about in the water, about 100 yards beyond my rod tip.
“I’m no expert.” I laughed, secretly hoping that he would misconstrue this comment as modesty. He did.
“You look like you know what you’re doing,” he added, wrongly.
I really didn’t. I hadn’t caught a single fish for months, despite at least 40 forays to the coast, but I decided I would carry on playing the part of the modest expert that he seemed to want me to be.
“Can you lend me some bait?” asked my new acquaintance, “I’ve just seen a huge fish out there? I want to try and catch it,” he said.
He peered into my bait ‘bucket’ – actually, it was a hat full of dying ragworms and rotting squid; it was a very hot day.
“Err, yeah, of course.” I was so overawed at his earlier description of me looking like I was a pro that I would have given him anything he asked for at that moment; it just shows what a bit of flattery does to a man.
“It’s a big orange thing,” he said and demonstrated its size by extending his arms to about a yard apart, something I much later learned to do after catching a tiny rockling (my first catch) about four weeks later.
Unwilling to let my actual knowledge belie my new status, I quickly searched the almost empty depths of fish-related knowledge in my mind, settling for a word a real fisherman had said earlier that morning.
“Wrasse,” I shouted, wondering at the same time how it might be spelt and immediately dismissing this worry as unnecessary. He probably wasn’t going to ask me to write it down for him. He didn’t, instead focussing on the word and repeating it over to himself, presumably so he could, in turn, impress others with his knowledge, not realising it was from a man who knew next to nothing and was almost certainly wrong.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my son roll his eyes; he knew I was winging it and that I didn’t actually know the difference between a wrasse and a tuna. I gave the swimmer a handful of rag, assured him that wrasse loved them, the only nearly correct thing I’d said so far (wrasse eat ragworms, but prefer it not to be quite as dead as mine), and watched as he squished them on to a large hook at the end of a very short line.
This surprised me. Even with my limited experience I realised he’d need more than 6ft of mono to cast the 100-odd yards out to where he’d found his prize, even if his fish was still there, waiting patiently to be caught. It turns out I was wrong about the length of line thing.
With a hearty “thank you” the bather-cumfisherman lowered himself into the kelp at my feet and vanished into the murky depths of Kimmeridge Bay. My son, Doog, looked as astonished as I felt.
I was transfixed by the sight of this curious figure slowly bobbing out to sea on a mission to re-write all I knew about fishing. Suddenly, he dived like a porpoise and vanished.
“Perhaps we’ve been doing it all wrong Doog,” I eventually muttered, “maybe we wasted our time learning to cast.”
I don’t know whether he eventually caught his prey or not, I never saw him again. I hope he didn’t drown as I’d grown to rather like him. I soon forgot all about the swimmer, distracted by some more traditional fishing action. My rod twitched, bent double and vanished into the sea, along with the particularly inadequate tripod it was resting on.
Although, as always, I hoped for my first bite, deep down I knew it was the ubiquitous seaweed and tide dragging the rod over and out of reach. As I clambered knee deep into the kelp to retrieve it, I felt no disappointment, as Churchill (or maybe it was Bear Grylls) once said: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Poor fisherman as I was (and probably still am), I certainly haven’t lost any enthusiasm.