I got mad into kayak fishing during lockdown and haven’t really done it since. I had never kayaked before in my life and within a couple of months I was paddling miles out into the bay. Some relatives, one in particular, told me I was “f ing mad”. And while I accept that assessment to some degree, I also verily believe that if you think any living person is “normal” then you do not know them very well. I have on countless occasions gotten to know people who seemed about as well-adjusted as anyone could ever be, that were, for want of a better expression, not playing with a full deck. But the world’s a stage, full of actors, and presumptions, and often the people that seem nuts, if you get to know them a bit, aren’t quite as bonkers as you thought, and sometimes what makes people seem a bit bonkers is their refusal to adhere to the “madness of crowds” as Charles Mackey put it in the title of his wonderful book in 1841, which I may summarise here in a post at a later date.
But back to my lockdown kayak adventures….
One morning a dolphin breached close to me and I felt an extraordinary sense of euphoria after dragging myself, very reluctantly, out of my bed. I dragged myself out of bed because there were only certain mornings when the tide and wind were favourable to going out in my little plastic blue boat. The oppressive and heavy feeling I had throughout that period vanished in a heartbeat, and kayaking around that morning and seeing that dolphin regularly breach near me felt like a gift from god.
On another occasion, a bull seal, that was literally humongous, breached beside me. And rather than feeling nervous, I felt enthralled out there on my little plastic boat, away from the madding crowd. I named him, affectionately, Billy the Bull Seal. There was another I called Sammy. And another I called Snoopy, because he was always snooping around trying to steal my fish. I didn’t really think of all these aquatic creatures as a separate species, but rather as very soothing companions that weren’t a bit perturbed by the time of Covid.
On one occasion, after paddling around ten miles along the bay, I hooked something so huge it almost pulled me into the watery abyss, and definitely would have only for my line snapped. I had made a rookie mistake by completely locking the drag on my rod, and any experienced fisherman will know that you’re not supposed to do that. Was it a shark? A ray? I have no idea. But whatever it was was big. Bigger than my rod could handle anyway, although it was a cheap rod and tended to bend quite dramatically with only one or two mackerel on it. But did this make me nervous? No, I went and bought a massive rod with a sturdy reel, called Warfare, thinking that next time I would wrestle with whatever fishy monster happened to be lurking in the depths of those waters.
Every time I went out in my kayak I stayed out a little longer and I got to the point where I could paddle as much as 20 miles in the day. I had a profound love affair with nature and it reset all the dials that that time period had made go a little haywire.
It’s funny, thinking about it now, because the enjoyment I was getting out of it at the time outweighed my fear of getting eaten alive by aquatic creatures, or indeed springing a leak, getting washed away in the tides, snapping a paddle, drowning, or by dying horribly in any other way. I literally had no fear at all and often felt like that character from Life of Pie that was stranded at sea with a tiger called Richard Parker. Lockdown had a funny effect on my consciousness as, out in the bay, as dangerous as it may have been, I felt there was nothing but absolute freedom. There was no masks, no social distancing, no people jumping out in the road in front of cars for fear of being within two metres of a bag of pathogen harbouring creatures that we used to see as fellow humans. There was just wind and water, life and death, seals eating fish and fish eating other fish, and myself eating fish; the whole period was very fishy all around. Even my car stank of fish.
What was even funnier was, one day I heard a posh woman walking along the shore, bragging to her friend, in about as law-di-daw a voice as I have ever heard, “Oh yes, we went out for lobster the other night and it was simply dee-vine.”
Her friend, who seemed interested or at least was good at faking it, said in an amazed oh-my-gosh tone, “Did you? And where was that now?” The reason I found it funny was because the day before I was out by Mutton Island, which is a sewage treatment plant, and saw that most, or at least a high amount of, lobster pots are around the island. I couldn’t help but laugh giddily to myself at the thought of the posh woman eating a lobster from waters which literally have raw sewage pumped directly into them daily. But maybe sewage adds to the flavour or makes it more of a delicacy? I do not know. I’ve never eaten lobster and don’t think I ever will to be honest. I don’t care how posh a meal it is, or how impressed a friend might be to learn that I had had some for dinner.
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