Old Ghosts

Image Above: Jack Pike caught on a homemade spoon lure.

  The lake was smaller than I remembered, like so much of my childhood world it had shrunk in my absence. There was one other angler perched on a tackle box with his rod on a rest while he smoked. I moved to the far end of the lake partly to put some distance between the splash of my fishing lures and his float but also to explore the small reed beds that fringed this narrow arm of water.  I cast a lure into the dull mudded water and begin the puppet show, retrieving the lure with jerks, twitches and straight runs that make the best of its unnatural wobble. Overhead gulls followed its progress swooping close to the water for a full inspection. 

I have come to catch a fish which for me is something different than going fishing, but there are other reasons. I have one fishing rod, a bait caster reel, scissors, a mat for unhooking, forceps, a camera with a broken screen, a mobile phone that has been partially gnawed by mice and four homemade spoon lures. I tell myself I am just fishing light, keeping mobile and agile. The lake sits in the rude green of a city centre park, the foot traffic is manly dog walkers and commuters but when the morning rush is over the benches fill with drunks and the skeletal faces of heroin addicts. Even the dogs grow meaner as jack russells give way to mastiffs and leads to chains and studded collars.

I work the banks and the reed beds, my lure flies almost effortlessly on long casts and if I side swing it bounces like skimmed stone whiffling out into the surface.  Close in there is a boil of water as the long flash of pike rolls in the depths. It has missed the lure, I cast again and again but the pike has given up or moved on.  I take my cue and make my way around to where lake widens fanning out casts to cover as much water as possible. When the near bank is exhausted I make my way through a shallow spit of mud onto what should be an island.

I fished here once as a kid with a friend and some other lads, the sons of a friend of his mother’s. They were older than us, teenagers that new things and smoked when they could lift cigarettes from their parents unguarded packets. Circumstances threw us in together and we set up here on the island to fish amongst the mud and old crisp packets in warmth of a summer evening. I don’t remember us catching much but my friend and the lads had other ideas. We got into some bullshit game of hide and seek, but it was about one thing only getting me away from my fishing tackle. When the game was over my tackle box was empty. Every last fishing float, weight and hook, things I had collected, things I had stared at for weeks in the glass cabinets of tackle shop until pocket money or Christmas money had liberated them.  They knew what they had done, my friend knew what they had done but they bullshitted their way out of it. It wasn’t the fishing tackle that hurt the most but being the one, that kid. I never saw much of that friend again, one of the lads I saw years later and it looked as if heroin had had the best of him. I suppose I learnt that stuff in tackle boxes doesn`t catch fish only the thing on the end of my line.   

Not much has changed here, the lampposts carry police warnings strapped to them and am I travelling light should history repeat itself.

I leave the island and return to the beginning, the reed beds and this time the pike hits its target and I land a Jack that looks a little over three pounds. It’s perfect, each scale placed on its flanks with care and bound in flashes of colour that melt away as rolls in the weak sunlight.  

The lure works and I pack up.

Image Below: Warning Signs

I am getting there

Image above: Handmade spoon lures, cast in Polyurethane, through wired and weighted, covered with textured foil, airbrushed and just awaiting a coat or two of Epoxy.

  This is it, the first day of producing fishing lures that will hopefully end up for sale.  I have spent the last three weeks preparing and making enough mistakes to have probably learnt something. If I had known how hard it was going to be and how much I would have to learn I am not entirely sure I would have started down this route. That said it has been fun so far, hopefully if I can sell them I may avoid getting a proper job and spend every Monday morning at the water’s edge and the rest of the week making lures. 

Fishing 9am Monday Morning

 A German Sub that used to sit on the dockside of the East Float

I can see that the bus is full but the driver pulls up anyway. The queue of commuters ahead of me is slowly absorbed until the vehicle is packed tight enough for it to feel like we have been poured into a mould. There is a thick scent of Monday morning, cigarettes, coffee, breakfast and the poison created when all are mixed with the miasma of competing perfumes and aftershave.   It is still a little before nine when we reach the city centre.

 I get off the bus a couple of stops before the terminus to avoid being swept into an office job by the wave of workers that will eventually crash through the doors as the bus finally draws to halt. A few people followed me and then disperse amongst the glass doorways anointed by brass plaques.  When I reach the docks I am alone save for a man wearing a captain’s hat and carrying a brief case, he descends  a set of stone steps  and boards what looks like a large sailing barge before disappearing below deck.

By the time I reach the Pier Head and the ferry terminus the rush hour is over and I am the only passenger to board from the Liverpool side of the river. In the lounge bar an oversized child of man is returning back over the water having just come along for the ride, he paces needlessly clutching a plastic bag as if it held some indescribable value.

 Facing into the flooding tide the boat growls its engines to make headway from the landing stage. The course is set over the narrowest gap between the shores lines a little under a mile, but what a mile. The water here runs near constantly at speeds over five knots pausing briefly as the tide turns and with it the direction of flow.  Apart from the speed and movement the colour of the river is a little more daunting varying between soft grey and muddy brown. This isn’t dirt in the dirty sense of the word but silt stirred up by the surge of the tides.

The ferry lands clumsily and I leave the man-child to ride out the day on the river and make my way to the East Float part of a vast dock network that was once an natural inlet of the Mersey, the river I have just crossed.

I last fished here when I was kid using garden worms for bait. Today I am spin fishing even though the water is too murky and my lure would probably only hook into a fish by pure fluke. Even so it is not long after nine and I am holding a fishing rod while decent folk are at work. A lot has gone from here the docks are no longer enclosed by warehousing and cranes but by naked concrete pads as vast as the water. I move freely where the cancer of fencing and barbed wire has yet to gain a foothold but it is to no end.  I leave after a couple of hours empty handed but proud that I had kept a promise I had made to myself to fish on Monday mornings at nine am.

On the landing stage again an old guy spots my fishing rod and asks if I had had any luck. And so we fall into talk about fishing, the docks, the river, cod, dabs, and a sea trout he caught off the dock wall. I tell him about the fishing on the island I used to live on and that the water that was clean down until the light ran out. As the ferry moves down the river on its longer route to take in another landing stage he points out fishing marks and the routes of the shipping channels, and where he moored his boat before his wife made him get rid of it.