Gone fishing

It's a few years since I've been fishing but when I was a lad it was a common occurrence, usually with Brother, Grandfather and Uncle.  Needless to say all the gear is still here and while it warrants a better job than you'll see here I wanted to see how it photographed, so I laid a few things out and snapped them up on FP4+:

Flies, reel and fishing knife on Foma 133

The print isn't as murky as you see here but neither is it substantially better, so I need to work a little on it. Actually this print was from a couple of weeks ago and I’ve since discovered that “the look” you see here is down to how Foma 133 reacts with Fotospeed's Warmtone WT-10 developer.  It just makes the whole thing a little too 'warm'.  Foma 133 performs better in straight Multigrade, I have since found and that’s what I’ll be using next time. Perhaps with a fishing rod as well and even a freshly caught salmon - although that might be pushing it a bit.  We'll see.  

My grandfather and uncle were both keen fishermen all their lives and it was the usual Saturday activity for a few years of my life.  My grandfather tied his own flies, so there's quite a collection of them.  It was proper course fishing, for salmon and trout (and the odd flatfish that was usually thrown back with disdain).  Salmon and trout, on the odd occasion they came, were taken home for the plate.

When the fish weren't taking the fly, then it was worm, or spinner.  Mostly worm, actually - Saturday mornings would be taken up with digging up a patch of the garden for a few dozen earthworms which were stored along with a little earth in an old jam jar with a few holes tapped out of the lid for air.  If you dig nowadays you'd be lucky to see a worm but back in the '70s they were plentiful.  What's all that about, eh?

Just a few of the spinners and Mepps that we used

 

Some of the spinners you see here were home-made - usually the simple copper ones.  Others were store-bought - like the Mepps which you can see in the along the bottom, right and top of the print.  They were strange things, with a colourful oblong disc which spins around the hook.  Due to the way they operated, an anti-kink device was required to counteract the spin, otherwise your line ended up fouling.   

Not fouling as much as if you were unlucky enough to catch an eel, mind.  Eels were the last thing you wanted on the end of your line.  They fought with the strength of a decent fish but would try to wrap themselves around any old half-submerged post or tree trunk and if they succeeded, you could say goodbye to your hook and a good few few yards of your line as well since most times the only way forward was to admit defeat and cut your line.  On occasion you'd be able to land one and then the fun really started.  Once on dry land, an eel was like a thing possessed and would wrap itself around your line several times - you had no chance of getting a grip on it long enough to cleanly extract the hook.  The only way forward (again) was to cut your line and then cut the damn eel into small pieces until life had expired, the thing had stopped wriggling and you could get your hook out.  Then you'd have to tie another cast on your line and attach the hook and re-bait it before you could resume.  It was, as you can imagine, a messy affair.  By the end, your hands would be full of eel scales, blood and guts and the place looked like a massacre had taken place - which it had, pretty much.  Eels were bad news.

By the time I was going fishing, there weren't many fish being caught - and there's a lot less these days by all accounts.  No, the day was mostly about being outside in the open air, in a beautiful part of the world. You came home pretty exhausted from casting several hundred times and walking a few miles up and down the riverbank in full thigh-length waders and waterproof coat, carrying fishing bag full of gear and a couple of rods. And your lunch, which mum had made in the morning - sandwiches, an apple and maybe a couple of biscuits.  I'm not sure hygiene was top of the list in those days - probably a quick rinse of the hands in the river was all they got.  It didn't seem to harm us, anyway.  They were great days and I loved them, fish or no fish.  Then as I got older the fishing Saturdays were replaced with working Saturdays, in my part-time job in the photographic department of a local Chemist's shop - which I also loved, but the memories of the fishing expeditions will always be a bit special.