The question is not how to fish, but why you do it. The author and his fishing buddies do it out of necessity. It’s more important than life and death to them to escape the human world, step in to water and wave a stick. Left on the shore is their misery and worries. Standing in the water they find freedom, healing and occasionally a fish.
Battles are lost and won with tongue in cheek and always celebrated with mountains of cake and an endless stream of fresh espresso coffee. To the band of brothers it’s more important who you fish with than how big the fish is; except for the ones lost.
You may not learn a lot about catching more and bigger fish, but reading these stories is like holding a mirror up in front of yourself getting a little wiser. The small why is a big one.
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- This artickel is written by Danish photojournalist Søren Skarby
When the Humpback Whale turned sixty he changed his life and the lives of the rest of us. Our more than complicated tax system gave him a refund from tax he paid around forty years before. It’s not something you can understand you just accept it. Bottom line was that he suddenly had money to spend so he bought a boat.
The Humpback Whale had spent a good part of his youth in southern Greenland. Life was simple; sleep, eat, work, hunt, fish and sail. Since there are no roads there and most of the coastline is one big archipelago, you sail in the big fjords and around the islands. There are three reasons to sail up there. You’re going to visit somebody, on a hunting trip or, most important, on your way to go fishing. The two latter are not only for the fun of it. There’s always room in the freezer for another reindeer or a bunch of arctic char. When you’re on your way in a boat in Greenland, wind in the hair and sailing in the breathtaking scenery, you’ve got two feelings. The first is the sense of being very small. It makes you humble. The other is freedom and it’s filling your soul. The Humpback Whale had been missing that feeling since he went back to the Baltic, now he could get it back.
The boat is not big or in any way fancy. A 21 feet well boat with a small wheelhouse with room for one and a 20 hp diesel engine, a proven and simple recipe for life on the waves. On the virgin fishing trip, we, the bricklayer, the math teacher and I, were fishing for flounder. The Humpback Whale just stood in his wheelhouse smiling more and more. In between catching fish we handed him coffee and praised the boat. The band of brothers had one of their better days cracking jokes and catching fish. After a time I looked into the wheelhouse and saw something had happened. The transformation had been slow, but there was no doubt: Man and boat had merged together in perfect harmony. It wasn’t possible to see if it was him or the boat that was smiling. We looked at each other and came to an agreement without words. After returning to the harbour we donated all of the days catch to the happy captain. We knew he would bring it home to his lady friend and she would understand why he had to buy a boat.
It wasn’t flounder that first came to mind when the Humpback Whale first told us he had bought a boat. South of the big island we live on there’s an archipelago, small islands with strong tidal current in between. Most of the water is shallow, but there’s a highway of deep water where the horde, the mackerel, pillage every summer. The boat was the key to get close to them. I’ve always been imagining mackerel as pirates with bandanas and knives clinched between the teeth. On their way they rage, rampage and plunder at a hair-raising pace. Nothing edible survives their feeding frenzy. So when we heard about the boat we all said mackerel in unison. Did I mention that these roaming raiders are not only fun to catch? They are damn good food too. It doesn’t matter if you roast, smoke or grill them, they are always tasty and pretty hard to ruin.
It always starts as rumour. Somebody has caught so and so many mackerel somewhere. That summer it was a story about a man and his six-year-old son catching around a hundred fish in a few hours. Then the rumours came in a steady stream. It was time to go. The deck of the boat was a bit crowded. All of the brotherhood wanted to take part in the fun. The math teacher and the biologist were mackerel virgins. They were hoping to pop their hymens. The rest of us told them stories about battles with the finned pirates while we loaded rods, bags and extra jackets till there was very little room left. No one complained and everyone was expecting the best day of the summer. Well, it was one of those summers where the weather changed between light showers and regular downpours. It rained most of that day.
We started out on the lee side of one of the islands. The mackerel highway is close to the shore there. Nothing happened and we sailed further out towards the open sea. On the way we fished the deep holes and caught a few straying striped mini tuna gone rough, but the horde wasn’t there. As we anchored for a break the math teacher told the rest of us that all of our stories about big catches were all fishermen’s lies. We ignored him. Who wants to listen to a mackerel virgin? After the usual ritual with coffee and Danish pastry it was time to hit the open sea. The Baltic Sea was a big lake some million years ago and seasoned sailors will find it hard to call it a sea, but to us it’s a bit nerve breaking to leave the safety of being close to the shore. We didn’t sail that far out, but there was two factors that made things go crazy, the tidal current and the wind.
The wind came from the east and the current was eastbound. Where the two forces met the water looked like an enormous boiling cauldron. Waves were coming from everywhere at the same time. “There”, said the Humpback Whale and pointed at the middle of pandemonium, “That’s where they are.” We looked at each other knowing that the captain is always right and then got ready for the boat to be rocked.
And we got rocked for sure. Unable to stand we were all down on our knees, one hand on the boat, the other on the rod. Chaos was not only above water. The captain was right, down under us the horde was in the middle of a giant feast, savagely inhaling everything that looked like food. The heavy lures accompanied by a bunch of flies up the line were lowered down. They didn’t reach the bottom before there was full house. Mackerel are inch-by-inch and ounce-by-ounce some of the fiercest fighters. Three, four or five fish pulling in the same direction can make every fisherman sweat, that’s part of the fun. The fight isn’t over when you have lifted the fish on board; very soon there were wiggling mackerel all over the deck tangling lines, flies and lures, the most wonderful anarchy you can imagine.
The Humpback Whale went Inuit and came out of the wheelhouse, glove on one hand and a long sharp knife in the other. Crawling on the deck he started to clean the fish, we just threw them in his direction. The two mackerel virgins soon had their hymens popped, except that the math teacher only hooked fish on his lure. As the fly fisher he is, he had tied flies for especially for mackerel, but they didn’t like his creations. After a while he changed the setup to a cheap ready-made Chinese leader with lousy looking flies. That did the trick and he started catching more than one at a time. “Mackerel is a bling-bling fish, it only wants cheap stuff”, said the bricklayer with a big smile. We all laughed and kept teasing the math teacher with his lack of fly tying skills.
If you hit the big jackpot when fishing mackerel the whole party is normally going on in a small area. We drifted over it again and again and kept on reeling in fish. For sure it was kind of blood lust, on the other hand we didn’t worry with that abundance of fish. One of the things the Humpback Whale learned in Greenland was that you have to keep on fishing when there’s fish. You’ll never know when you get a chance to catch food again. That’s why he went Inuit and stored all the cleaned fish in boxes with ice. It’s the other way round with the math teacher; he has never known the feeling of lack of food and released some of the mackerel. When he did it with a particular good one the Humpback Whale looked at him in disbelief, “Bloody sports fisherman”, he mumbled and returned to the wheelhouse.
When the second box was full even the Humpback Whale said it was enough and started talking about sailing home. We reeled in still laying on our knees; the deck was too slippery to stand on from fish slime, guts and scales. On our way to calmer water we met two harbour porpoise aiming for the party, the evening light reflected in their aqua dynamic shaped bodies. Fingers were stretched to point them out; they are always a welcome sight. We knew that they are professionals and that we will forever be amateurs.