TALES FROM THE TIDELINE
Do you remember your first time? Simon Smith brings to life the magic and beauty of one young man’s first night fishing session
Softness. That is the first thing that crossed the boy’s mind as he trailed along the beach, glancing all round him at every minor detail as he went. This beach, a beach he had fished so many times before, a place with which he was so familiar, now seemed to be dissolving gently in front of his eyes with the oncoming dusk.
As the day slid toward its slow closure, he drank it all in: the soft pink hue suffusing everything, the chill edge to the air, the gentle swill of the tide’s edge pushing its way up the beach, like a memory forming.
“You okay?” Grandad called from just up ahead where he plodded through the sand with his friend. It had taken an age to get to this point, to convince his family that he was a big boy, old enough to fish beyond the confines of dusk and on into darkness, so he was damned sure he wasn’t going to give them a chance to rescind that privilege by showing any signs of weakness.
“Yeah, I’m fine”, he chimed back.
Within 10 minutes, they had walked to their chosen spot and plonked the gear down, ready to set up. The boy judged his spot, just close enough to the adults not to trigger their paternal instinct for safety and beckon him closer, but just a few feet further away than might have been expected, just to give him a little sense of independence. The adults, relaxed on the beach at the end of a long week, chatted away as they absent-mindedly began the ritual of threading line through rod rings and tackling up. The boy was quiet, thoughtful. Throughout the classes of the past week, those insufferable, endless stints of maths and science and French, he had thought of nothing else, choosing and re-choosing his rigs, his approach, which baits he would fish on which hooks, fishing through the session minute by imagined minute, so that by the time he had tackled up and baited his rig, he had lived this session a thousand times over, and felt as though he knew what might happen almost before it happened. The boy strolled to the water’s edge, looked up at the horizon and hit the cast as far as he could, seeing it land with a satisfying ‘sploosh’ 50 yards away.
As he placed the rod in the stand, he looked up and noticed suddenly the grey world, much smaller, much quieter, ageing quickly in front of his very eyes and “woah”, he took two quick steps backward, away from the advancing tide already lapping at his feet. Things were closing in swiftly. Already time to move the gear. He dragged first his seat and bag, then the rod stand back, angling them slightly so that he moved a few feet closer to the grown-ups. Better. The rod tip stood proud, motionless, up there in the air as a foca
