How to Catch a Fish

By Kevin Ireland

Packed with gloriously funny stories, this guide not only gives advice on how to get started fishing but also discusses the serious impact of over-fishing, which threatens oceans and rivers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Awa Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781877551048

Book preview

A word of warning

LIKE ALL VERY average anglers, I sometimes think I know what I’m talking about. This is a mistaken view. But I am a writer as well, so I’m not going to be stopped. I also weight what I have to say in favour of talk about brown and rainbow trout. This may also be a mistake on my part, but it’s the area of fishing that interests me and takes up most of my time on the waters. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a feeling that all other forms of fishing don’t match up. They do, and I mention them from time to time. It’s simply that I’m not bothered about seeming fair. I’m biased towards catching these fish.

The men and women I know who go out on the waters are similarly prejudiced in their various ways. They can’t help it. They are dedicated to fish and fishing. They talk about such quaint subjects as the drains in a medieval monastery not because they get misty-eyed about religion or the architecture, although they may admire or be addicted to these things. No, they want to know how the monks went fishing and how this activity affected the rivers around them.

Equally, they want to know what methods Maori used to catch enough fish to feed large communities, and what the Chinese thought about fishing a thousand years ago, as well as the possible influence of a full moon on the disposition of both sprat and shark, and what the weather will be like tomorrow morning. They have a general fascination with absolutely everything that swims, and especially those species that have scales – except those of justice.

Why do it?

THE FIRST THING you need to be told, if you ever suffer from an itch to catch a fish, is: don’t do it. Instead of undertaking any task so crazy, you should go down to your local fish shop and buy a snapper or flounder or salmon, or walk into your nearest grocery shop and purchase a bagful of assorted tins of tuna and sardines. The itch may pass and that way you won’t need to rig yourself out in elaborate gear, travel with great inconvenience to remote places, risk getting your feet wet, catch your death of cold and face the humiliation of coming back empty-handed. Shopping for fish is extraordinarily safe, besides being quick, clean, straightforward and comparatively inexpensive. It is the sensible thing to do.

No man or woman in their right mind would ever go fishing, unless they own a fishing trawler and hope to make a profit. But that’s the second point everyone needs to know: taking part in ridiculous activities is its own reward. Right-minded activities are all too frequently concerned with what we call the ‘realities’ of everyday life, and when we inspect these realities closely we discover them to be little more than thousands of aimless, meaningless or imagined rituals, pressures and enterprises that actually molest our existences, and fishing is the perfect escape from them.

Which doesn’t mean to say that fishing is pure escapism, or that it has nothing to do with work. Fishing always involves going somewhere, with some sort of plan and purpose, and it can engage you in concentrated physical activity, as well as the active commitment of your mind and the intense application of your whole sense of being.

Yet it must be faced that, even for those occupied in the endeavour, there is something very odd about taking a line and a hook, not to mention a whole collection of other gear, to a sometimes far distant sea, lake or stream, then spending hours or days or weeks trying to outwit a creature with a brain often smaller than a pea and existing in a liquid environment that our more adventurous and ambitious ancestral species crawled out of hundreds of millions of years ago in order to draw a reasonable lungful of air.

The pursuit of certain types of fish seems even more peculiar to most level-headed people when they take into account that some of the most elusive fish – which are usually the most expensive to hunt – are simply caught, landed, admired, then returned to the water, where they are allowed to swim away. Fish are not always stalked for the table. No longer is it a regular sight for huge mako sharks and striped marlin to be left hanging dead on a gantry at the end of a wharf, or for giant trout to be knocked on the head with a deadly weighted club called a priest. To a large and increasing number of fishermen and women, trophy fish are recorded in the memory, or by camera, or not at all. They belong back where they came from.

So, why do it? That is the question that haunts the vast literature on the subject (and not just in the English language) that has been accumulating since the day someone got it into their head that fishing wasn’t something you might do only when you felt hungry: you could do it for reasons that included an interest in wildlife and entomology, sport, art, risk, relaxation, curiosity, human ingenuity, pleasure in the sea or the countryside, the joys of life and the rewards of solitude, as well as a host of more private explanations and excuses.

Yet these can be only part of the answer. A lasting motivation must come from deep within, and it has as much to do with simple stubbornness and personal compulsion as it does with any complex notions of happiness and mystical fulfilment. The last thing to which it has any reasonable relationship is success.

There is a huge satisfaction in fishing well and winning a tussle with a worthy creature that breathes through gills, but just being out there on the water is the essence of the experience, and only a young or novice fisherman feels a burden in returning home at night and admitting that he or she hasn’t caught a fish. I have spent some of the best days of my life when the fish either hid or had me completely beaten.

My compensation has always lain in the satisfactions of the secretive sound and sly movement made by a stream as it searches its way to a river, the curl of a cloud across a tussock ridge, the rustle of willows, the tilting of a hawk as it glides across a valley, the smell of the earth, the touch of stone and grass, the expectation of small pleasures, and even the intense taste of a sandwich eaten in the hollow of a green river-bank, the interest of a

Reviews for How to Catch a Fish

[adzebill · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Captures the draw of birdwatching to an outsider, who immerses himself in the world for a year. Great interview with Turbott and cameos by Major Wilson of Bulls and Buller.

[ireadthereforeiam · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This little book was knocked off in an hour and a half. Its really like reading an extended article, or newspaper column. Funny that, as the author is actually a columnist for our national Sunday paper. It was a treat to be reading the bird and place names that are so familiar to me.Less bird encyclopedia, and more an exploration of the authors new interest in birds, this book is quietly delightful. We hear snippets about the authors personal life, about life in New Zealand in general, and about that breed of bird aficionados: Birders. But what fascinated me was the subset of that group of Birders, the Twitchers.These folk "collect" sightings of bird species and compete against each other. In a Twitcher's quest to be the person with the highest number of sightings, they will travel long distances at short notice, have their sighting verified, then vamoose again sometimes showing little or no interest in the other birds that are about. It all seems very odd to me. But then again, my interest in birds is limited to simply loving the sound of the NZ native bush birds.Braunias gives us a slice of the lives of others, and confesses to being a bird addict himself now too. But I cant help but feel like a publisher called him up and said: "we need a book about birds, can you five us 30,000 words by the end of next month?".

[lovinglit · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This little book was knocked off in an hour and a half. Its really like reading an extended article, or newspaper column. Funny that, as the author is actually a columnist for our national Sunday paper. It was a treat to be reading the bird and place names that are so familiar to me.Less bird encyclopedia, and more an exploration of the authors new interest in birds, this book is quietly delightful. We hear snippets about the authors personal life, about life in New Zealand in general, and about that breed of bird aficionados: Birders. But what fascinated me was the subset of that group of Birders, the Twitchers.These folk "collect" sightings of bird species and compete against each other. In a Twitcher's quest to be the person with the highest number of sightings, they will travel long distances at short notice, have their sighting verified, then vamoose again sometimes showing little or no interest in the other birds that are about. It all seems very odd to me. But then again, my interest in birds is limited to simply loving the sound of the NZ native bush birds.Braunias gives us a slice of the lives of others, and confesses to being a bird addict himself now too. But I cant help but feel like a publisher called him up and said: "we need a book about birds, can you five us 30,000 words by the end of next month?".