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. 

Making bobbin holders for fly tying

Another homemade vid.

So I live in the city again and I have already been on google earth to plan my first fishing trip which will be at Nine o'clock on Monday morning while honest men and women are at work.

The Last Fish Supper

Image Above:  The last fishing lures I have made on the island. (foil covered cast polyurethane)

I have three days left on the island, three days to finish packing and leave. This afternoon I put away my fishing rods, oiled the reels, boxed them and then Filleted and cooked the coley I caught on Friday.

The plan for the rest of the afternoon was to take a trailer load of boxes off the island by tractor at low tide. Fortunately the cold weather had killed the tractor’s battery. Finding myself at a loose end I went for a walk up to the highpoint of the island. The Sun had just begun to set out over the ocean and was running shards of light from a low cloud base onto the distant reefs that crowd the Duhb Artach lighthouse.

Closer to the island’s shores smaller islets and reefs filled out the view like a living map. I traced out the familiar routes taken on fishing trips between marks. I suppose I learnt to fish here in these waters and when I wasn’t fishing I learnt to make things that caught fish. I tied my first mackerel rigs with feathers plucked from the carcass of a whooper swan that had been brought down by the island’s power lines. My fishing weights came from scrap lead gutters, my floats old corks and garden canes, fishing spoons made from cutlery and wobblers carved from old pine bed heads.  

And beside the fish and the tackle, there were the people who I dragged out to sea. Jefferson a Brazilian who had spent too long in Italy and ran on espressos and cigarettes, talked twenty to the dozen and was incompressible in four languages. His verbal circus only subsided while he peed over the side, which he swore was a proven way of attracting fish if combined with the magic words ‘here fishy, fishy’.

Anna a performance poet, playwright, international aid worker and when she needed the money a nanny. Every fishing trip was a humiliation as she generally caught more and larger fish that the rest of the male members of the crew.  

Orlando, an Austrian pastry chef who said he would come fishing if I would “shut up” while in the boat.

 Martin who I lied to, we hit a shoal of large coal fish and filled a fish basket, then a rod broke under the strain and then a reel and we hauled up the lines by hand until the anchor hold was full of fish, and I told him it was like this every time I went fishing.

Val an accidental fishing buddy, who while enjoying a spin round the island had to watch me gut twenty mackerel, a horrific sight normally but especially if you are a vegan Buddhist.

Rupert who threw up his dinner through his nose, wiped his face and continued fishing.

PJ (he knows who he is) who took me on my first fishing trips when I came to the island. His voyages were epic every rock and islet peppered with a commentary that was not constrained by mere fact, but included ship wrecks, tales of nuns from Iona who had buried treasure and fish so large  that they had required industrial lifting gear.  Conger hypnotizing was just one of his minor side-lines.

Alberto, a true Italian from a mountain valley so deep that the sun visited its murky depths for only two hours a day giving him an unnatural fear of sunburn. When we caught mackerel he called them by their scientific name repeating the word Scomber and I assumed he had science background until I later discovered the Italians had largely invented Latin.

Louis my oldest son and king of the mackerel bashers who following in his father’s footsteps hacked into his fringe with a pair of nail scissors and used the trimmings to tie his own lure. Charlotte, my daughter who was present when I hauled up my largest Pollock.

My wife, who screamed so loudly and for so long when she hooked her first fish that I had to prise the fishing rod from her grip and land it myself.

Image Below: Sheep Island (soay), sound of Iona