He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff
in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now
without taking a fish.
I know what it is to be salao, what Ernest Hemingway in
the opening to his Nobel-prize-winning work, The Old Man
and the Sea, called the “worst form of unlucky.”
So do Scotland’s River Tay ghillies who go out in
their boats at this time of the year, sweeping the water,
zig-zag fashion, harling baits from the back of the boat
in the hope of a spring salmon.
Thirty years ago they would have launched their boats on
a Monday morning with every hope of a catch within the hour.
Each boat would signal its score to the next with a white
handkerchief, up and down the river. In that way, news travelled
fast. Today, however, there are far more blank days than
lucky ones on the Tay as other rivers show signs of recovery.
For hours on end the ghillies will criss-cross the water,
chatting as they go with the old men in their boats, often
retired company directors who have opted for a gentler style
of fishing. There is not much else to do. The Tay has been
poor in spring for years.
The ghillie, meanwhile, sits at the outboard facing the
weather, watching the rod tips, taking comfort sometimes
from a cigarette wedged between thin blue lips. It’s
hard going. The bait of choice is the Kynoch Killer, a fish-shaped
plastic lure, wedged at one end to cut down in to the water.
Most of the fly anglers I know have little time for harling.
I understand their argument that the real skill belongs
to the boatman and the way he covers the water. On the other
hand sharing a boat makes for interesting conversations.
Some people seem to be drawn to boat fishing, whether drifting
on a loch or cruising after big game on the open sea. But
I wonder if the glory days of harling are over, just as
they are in some kinds of saltwater boat fishing, in the
UK at least.
The 1920s and 30s was the great era of fishing for Atlantic
blue-fin tuna, when the sport’s pioneers, people such
as Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry were making prodigious catches
in the North Sea.
Mitchell-Henry, who holds the British record for a blue-fin
– or tunny as they used to be called – of 851
pounds, would head out to sea on a herring trawler to the
fishing grounds off Scarborough and Whitby.
As the trawlers hauled in their nets, the game fishermen
would launch a rowing boat and seek to hook in to one of
the tunny, feeding off discarded herring from the nets.
Today, the blue-fin tuna seems to have disappeared from
UK coastal waters, killed off, most probably, by commercial
long line fishing.
Prize blue-fin, however, are still being caught off the
north-East coasts of Canada and the US. The all-tackle record
belongs to a fish of 1,496 lbs, caught off Novia Scotia
in 1979. But is there a future for this kind of fishing?
While fishing for some big species such as marlin and sail
fish continues to thrive in certain “hot spots,”
the worldwide numbers of big game fish are thought to have
fallen, by some estimates, to 10 per cent of what they were
over half a century ago.
I have never warmed to this kind of fishing, partly because
of the cost and opportunity, partly because I get sea sick
and partly because, as in harling, I believe that the real
skill belongs to the boatman.
But Peter Bristow, an Australian-born charter skipper
who works out of Funchal in Madeira*, argues that it takes
a combination of boat and angling skills to bring in a marlin
over the 1,000 lb mark.
“You need to have skill in the chair and you need
real strength for some of the biggest fish,” says
Bristow. I was chatting with him during a recent holiday
on the island although it was out of season for the Blue
Marlin that patrol these waters in the summer.
It can be a dangerous sport. Last year, the son of one
fisherman, game fishing off Bermuda, was skewered through
the arm and taken overboard by a marlin that lept across
the back of the boat. It took him down, maybe 50 ft, but
he struggled free and survived.
At the height of the season, international game fishers
converge on Madeira where they will be willing to part with
between Euros 1,000 and Euros 1,500 a day for a boat charter
that can guarantee them nothing. There are plenty of blank
days here too. In between, however, there are some giant
fish.
Just across from the balcony of our Madeira apartment,
about a mile to the west of Funchal and two miles to the
south of the island, there is a rocky shelf where some currents
intersect and where the marlin congregate in July. “That’s
where we can find some big fish,” says Bristow. “It’s
one of the very best spots off the island and one of the
best in the world,” he says.
But are they the last of their kind? That record-sized
marlin are still out there is indisputable, although fish
sizes today are most likely to be estimated. Is killing
a large marlin justifiable to claim a record? I don’t
think so. The Funchal boats today all practice catch-and-release
among the bill fish, tagging the catches before they put
them back.
Bristow’s average fish size last year was between
800 and 900 lbs. “But I have had two fish on here
in the past two years that were conservatively 1,500 lbs.
Then there are the fish that cannot be caught. They are
just too big and never make a mistake. For a giant fish
like this to be taken it must make a mistake,” he
says.
It seems ironic that at the very time that catches in some
areas have been improving, overall stocks appear in danger.
The Old Man and the Sea and its story of loss and waste
– his big fish is eaten by sharks – is recognised
today as an allegory of the crucifixion. But I think it
was saying something too about the need for all of us to
consider our relationship with the planet. In that sense
it was prophetic of leaner times ahead. Fishing in desolate
seas and rivers really has to be the worst form of unlucky.
