Kayak Fish Finder
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” Blaise Pascal
The first thing I notice when I stop paddling is silence. I am about two miles out into Galway Bay on this calm September afternoon and I become aware of a slightly staticky/ringing noise in my ears which is something I only ever notice when there is almost complete silence around me. The gentle motion of the ocean rocks me slightly and the only sound is the vague lapping of the water against my boat. And I feel euphoric, and it reminds me of the first time I went out in my kayak during lockdown, when the whole world seemed to have become like a kind of open-air asylum. I wrote a bit about that here.
There always seems to be some kind of noise in the world. When one is at home, there’s always a TV blaring, a phone ringing, or a phone in one’s hand filling one’s brain with audio visual distraction. When out in the street there’s the sound of traffic and the incessant murmuring of other people, along with billboards advertising this and that and trying to convince you that you need shit that you do not need, like more distractions in the form of a subscription-based TV service with the latest crap series, some sugar based junk food, or perhaps a Rolex watch which is really just overpriced wrist decoration. Nobody needs a watch anymore now that we all have mobile phones, never-mind one that costs thousands, and I can’t see any reason why anyone would want one other than an entirely imagined sense of one’s own self-importance.
I was watching a program on TV the other day and they were showing various houses around Ireland that were priced from 1-5 million. The houses were excessively big and some of them had these huge glass windows and all I could think was that it would be a full time job to keep the bloody windows clean. I imagined myself living in one of these houses and having to assemble a search party of at least a dozen people so as to find my keys, phone, or wallet, and I felt frustrated at the idea. The agents in each house kept mentioning the lovely space which would “be perfect for entertaining guests” and I couldn’t help but feel violated at the thought of all these fictitious “guests” in my mansion. Another thing they kept pointing out was these balconies with “amazing views” where one could “sit and drink one’s coffee in the morning”. I don’t drink coffee anymore and I’m pretty sure the view would get boring rather quickly. On a gloomy rainy day, the likes of which we have a lot in Ireland, I expect the view would look pretty crap most of the time, and most views get boring to look at pretty quickly anyway. The agents talked about there having been interest in the properties from “high value clients” as if they were somehow superior to average Joe, and so I was a bit surprised to see that these fancy houses had multiple toilets throughout. It seemed a bit odd that such “high value” people would have to experience the inconvenience of going to the toilet like everyone else does.
And so, I’m out in the bay feeling pretty content in my little plastic boat, with my fishing rod dangling into the sea and thinking life really couldn’t get any better than it is right now in this moment, although I vaguely think it might be nice to have a bit of company. I imagine myself married and maybe having a lovely wifey that might like to accompany me on such adventures, but then I think of some of the relationships I’ve had and suspect that I may be more inclined to enjoy the time away from my imaginary wifey, but it’s nice to daydream about ideal scenarios and for some reason I’ve been having such daydreams a lot this past while, and even created a Spotify playlist of love songs which you can listen to here if you want to. Pretty cringe, I know, but I like being a bit cringey sometimes.
Shortly thereafter a boat from the Aran islands goes by and I spontaneously decide to wave my arm in the air and yell “WOOHOO” to see if anyone will wave back. And to my delight, a couple of people do. It was probably a bit of a childish thing to do but for some reason I got a tremendous amount of satisfaction when I spotted someone waving back. The waves created by the big boat jostle me about a bit but it’s grand.
Around this time I get a tingle on my line and so I reel it in. There are four fish on it: two gurneys, and two pollock, but they are really small and so I throw them back. They wriggle frantically as I try to remove them and I start talking to them in a reassuring voice, telling them not to worry, that they are too small for eating and on account of that I was going to send them on their way so as they could carry on happily living their lives, and that maybe I might come back and catch them again when they are actually big enough so as to be worth eating. I’m sure they have no idea what I am saying, and it feels a bit mad to be talking to fish, but there’s nobody else out here to talk to and so I don’t care, and it amuses me. At the same time, I wonder how many months of solitude it would take before one would go so mad as to perhaps think that the fish were talking back. Shortly thereafter, I caught a decent sized mackerel which I opted to keep for my tea.
When I haven’t been fishing for a while I always feel a bit guilty about catching, killing, and eating another living creature; it almost feels cannibalistic. But I guess that’s because most of us are completely detached from what we eat. We’re the only animals on earth that walk around artificially lit supermarket aisles with little metal trolleys with funny little wheels, pulling pre-packaged cuts of meat and fish off of shelves and dumping them into our trollies. And while doing this our brains are perhaps lost in some melodic music from the store speakers which keeps us a little bit distracted from the whole weirdness of the process. At the checkout the person there runs each product past an infrared barcode scanner thingy which goes bloop, bloop, bloop, a bazillion times a day and I sometimes think that if I had to listen to that sound all day, every day, I might go insane and start having imaginary conversations with the toilet rolls.
And so I’m out in the bay, paddling around, feeling quite liberated from the noise and insanity of the world, when half a dozen young people (I hear male and female voices) come out in a medium sized boat, blaring out some Ed Sheeran song and sculling beer. The boat was roughly 25ft by 12ft and had plenty of standing room for the passengers. I don’t mind Ed Sheeran ordinarily but at this moment it feels a bit pornographic to me. But it’s only a momentary disturbance as they go speeding off again, and the ripples they create make my boat rock a bit.
I catch a few more mackerel and shortly thereafter see a seal’s head near me. I reel in my rod as I don’t want to risk hooking him. I think seals are fascinating little creatures, they always remind me of dogs.
The sun starts to sink towards the horizon and I realise, in the midst of my daydreaming, I’ve actually drifted a bit further out into the bay than I had intended. If for some reason my boat sank right now I’d have a rather exhausting swim to the nearest island and would have to wait several hours for low tide so as to be able to get back to the mainland. But my boat is grand, I think, but at the same time a vague sense of anxiety prompts me to start paddling back towards shore before it gets too late.
I hook a couple of more mackerel on the way back in, and since I have six, I decide to reel in my line and call it a day
The colours in the sky as the sun sinks are ethereal shades of brilliant red, orange, and purple, and my mind feels as calm as a warm summer’s breeze, and I feel an almost spiritual connection to the fish that I caught, which I later gut and put in the oven. I don’t know if it’s because such fish are fresh and totally free of any kind of preservation, or if it’s the experience of having a closer relationship to what one has caught and killed oneself, but eating such fish always leaves me with a feeling of invigoration such that I never experience with any food that I have ever eaten from a supermarket.
I go to bed relaxed and content, and feeling grateful to be alive. Today was a good day, and I feel like a proud hunter gatherer guy.
:)
