BEASTS FROM THE FOG!

Three anglers get huge bites...but what came out of the mist?

W hen I lived at Tynemouth on the coast to the east of Newcastle, several of us used to fish King Edward’s Bay on a regular basis, and one night myself and five mates had arranged to meet down on the beach.

It was one of those nights when there was a very thick fog, no wind and not a sound to be heard. Three of us arrived first and waited for the others for a few minutes and then decided to carry on.

It was low water and, as we strolled to the water’s edge, we realised there was a big sandbank in front of us with a gulley filled with water only about a foot deep. The three of us decided to cross over to it. We tackled up, cast out and stood there lost in our thoughts, not making a sound.

About 20 minutes or so later, we heard the the other three lads coming down the beach towards us…or so we thought. After a while we realised that they had remained on the beach and hadn’t noticed there was a sandbank out in front of them.

SCREAMS

The next thing we knew, lead weights were dropping on the sand beside us. For some reason, all three of us thought the same thing at the same time; without saying a word, we picked up the lines that had been cast next to us and gave them some almighty pulls.

This resulted in yells from the beach, such as “What a bite” and so on. We kept tugging at the lines for several minutes and the three of us got close together and very slowly allowed the anglers on the beach to wind in their rigs.

As we loomed up out of the fog, there were screams of terror as rods and reels were thrown away. The last we saw of them, they were disappearing up the beach at a considerable rate of knots.

When they discovered it was us, they threatened to beat us to jelly, but eventually they saw the funny side of it. Even now, when I think about it, I still laugh. n