Fishy tales

DSC00498.JPG
Originally uploaded by Jack Pine.

I fished on the river Afton and sometimes on the Nith. The english would come up and fish the slow moving reaches of the Nith for pike and pearch.

Sitting on the bank of a river and throwing bait into the water to attract fish is not fishing, to really fish you had to be Scottish and "walk the water", and the fish the english caught and thought were magnificent were beneath contempt. The Scots would kill pike and pearch and leave them to rot on the banks of the river. The only true fish that a fisherman would go after were trout or salmon.

Most of the time I went fishing with my Uncle Andrew who was a miner, and all of his free time was taken up with fishing. When you are down in the black dank of the mines you tend to spend all of your free time out in the open air and in the sunshine. He was a worm fisher and loved to go fishing when the Nith was in spate. When the water was muddy. It was then that he caught his biggest and best fish. Even though I tried to emulate his moves, observed how he crouched, cast the line in places that he favoured, I never caught anything. Some people are good at fishing, some people are good at betting on horses. It is a mystry what you have to do to succeed.

My father was of the opinion that the secret was in the worms you used. He was a great fisher when he was a boy, or at least he said so, and he would tell tales of titanic struggles to land a salmon. The reeling in and the letting go of the line, the exact gauge of the trace, the breaking strength of the line and its colour.

I would trudge home with an empty basket and he would say. "Let me see the worms you're using" I would show him. "Too small you need bigger worms" I would use bigger worms but get nothing and he would say "It's cloudy today you should have tried bramble worms" I would try bramble worms which I dug up from the sewage plant on the outskirts of town. They were stripy worms, but they didn't work either. "That's because you are not putting them on your hook properly" He would tell me how to bait a hook and out I went again, but only returned empty handed.

He only ever told me what to do. He never actually went fishing with me. I wonder why that was?