Fishingcatchup Videos

Wailing whaling ships. So sure of the shore. Tied up in ocean tide. Baited with bated breath. To reel in a real catch. Waters mined without mind. Dying creatures, dyeing seas red. Mourning the morning dead.

With anointed nets unfurled. Cast shimmering into shadowy waters. Rippling waves of the surface disturb. Snaring life from the pressures of the deep. Hauling huge volumes of the vulnerable. Struggling, gasping breaths emerging. Caught, enclosed in fear and death.

The women who clean fish are all named Rose or Grace. They wake up close to the water, damp and dreamy beneath white sheets, thinking of white beaches. It is always humid where they work. Under plastic aprons, their breasts foam and bubble. They wear old clothes because the smell will never go. On the floor, chlorine. On the window, dry streams left by gulls. When tourists come to watch them working over belts of cod and hake, they don’t look up. They stand above the gutter. When the belt starts they pack the bodies in, ten per box, their tales crisscrossed as if in sacrament. The dead fish fall compliantly. It is the iridescent scales that stick, clinging to cheek and wrist, lighting up hours later in a dark room. The packers say they feel orange spawn between their fingers, the smell of themselves more like salt than peach.

He took me fishing. Meaning, I cast and fouled my fishing reel in rapid succession, forgetting to thumb break, creating snarled messes, rending the whole thing unusable. He swapped his gear for mine, untangled the abortion I’d created, handed me back an operational rod, just as I messed up again. Rinse. Repeat. He never once scowled or raised his voice. When we got back to the house, Granny asked how fishing went. Paw-paw smiled, “Wonderfully.”

I imagine The fish wonder. “will that guy be back?” A gnarled old pickerel Comments: “yeah, he’ll probably get me on the same stupid mousey thing.” “I know it’s comin’ but I just can’t resist it.” An old frog chimes in: “Yeah, he got me with that once.” “chewy, with a hint of garlic.” A mud crusted Muskrat laughed. “Man, I love it when he gets snagged in the trees. Boy does he know some very spicy words and phrases.” “First time I ever saw a Beaver blush” added an Egret. They know I’m coming!!! And I know they can’t resist My “Mouse - E- Tongue” lure. Let the games begin.

Water-flesh gleamed like mica: orange fins, red flankspots, a char shy as ginseng, found only in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear of faraway creeks no map could name. My cousin showed me those hidden places. I loved how we found them, the way we followed no trail, just stream-sound tangled in rhododendron, to where slow water opened a hole to slip a line in, and lift as from a well bright shadows of another world, held in my hand, their color already starting to fade.

crescent, snow-capped peaks rising against the sky, blue meets white, green collides with shadows of gray, touching blue, glimmering diamonds on water, trout nipping flies on sly, kayak sliding westward, sunset a breathtakingly burnt-orange hue.

be patient little angler overcast

They are fermin the fower winds: Five grey- stemmed daffodils on the hill abuin Eynhallow that whirlmagig air intil pouer. Aa Simmerdim on Flotta – a thrummlin column o virr: the fleerin ee o Sauron lowps and rages in its touer. Fishermen wi lap tops, tractors steert by Sat Nav, Progress chaps our door unbiddan tae win us ower. Sunlicht asklent a green wave maun be wrocht as an equation: the Physic mind is mappamouned whaur aa is swack and sure. The makar speirs the silence, raiks the taigle o time-wrack for signs and kennings, patterns thrang in his hairst o hours. The solar wind pents miracles yet a muckler ane by faur, we’re a mystery o pairticles ablaw the cosmic glower. For aye we’re raxin scaffolding o sense on circled yirth whiles Magnus sails his saundstane ark abuin our clash and stouer.

On that sinuous passage from infancy and youth’s buoyancy through middle life to advanced years, the one certainty is a gathering of momentum consistent with time’s flow – something scarcely uppermost in my mind as the trout I’m playing draws me downstream till rocked by the tidal undertow I fight to retain my balance: hard to know where the river ends and the sea begins.