May to September- Part Two

Part Two: Island of Many Seas

Thanet is the thinnest, easternmost point of Kent; it’s almost a peninsula and was certainly an island for many centuries. Urban legend wrongly maintains that the Romans named the island ‘Thanatos’, after the god of death, having found so much evidence of human sacrifice here. The word then supposedly evolved into the modern name ‘Thanet’. This is nonsense. For one thing, Thanatos is a Greek word. Granted, posh Romans used Greek the same way Del Boy used French; notwithstanding, the word Thanet actually derives from the Celtic word ‘Tan’, which means fire. Modern Welsh carries the same meaning. It was given this name due to an ancient fire beacon that once burned here.

The fire died long ago but a lighthouse was built on its spot, and still shines to this day. Twenty-three years ago, one of my best friends crashed his car into the grounds; his hatchback smashed clean through the wall that surrounds the site. As it did so, the vehicle temporarily left the ground and a state of complete inertia was experienced by all its passengers. I should know. I was sitting up front next to the driver.

Two minutes prior, my friend had been driving erratically on the long road that winds down to the lighthouse. A voice in my head said:

“Put your belt on, now.”

It was a voice I recognised and trusted. I immediately fastened the belt and shortly afterwards, we crashed. As the car left the ground, my friend’s face met the steering wheel and blood exploded everywhere. I felt my body being pulled forward with immense force. The seatbelt countered this with equal vim, snatching me back no sooner had I moved a quarter inch; without this opposing force, I would have been thrown straight through the front windscreen. The car landed within two seconds and came to rest at the front door of a holiday cottage on the grounds. Apart from my friend’s nose, we all got out unscathed.

The warning voice I’d heard was that of my subconscious mind. Like any creature that arrives into their middle age with some health intact, it’s a voice I’ve heard (and obeyed) many times since. As an angler, it’s a voice I’d already heard long before the lighthouse crash. Most often it told me to ‘Strike!’ as my float dipped under the surface of the local pond, or as my rod tip began to rattle on a rising tide.

More than any other sport, fishing demands the use of one’s wits- especially if you want to master a territory. For many of us, that’s the ultimate goal- and it always begins with the capture of a single fish. I remember the first tench I caught on the Hacklinge Marshes. After releasing it, I watched until its scalloped tail disappeared into the weeds. Afterwards, my mind kept watching until those weeds became first a jungle, then an empire. I dreamed about the land the tench inhabited; I pored over maps in my local until last orders; I bought weed racks and spent hundreds of hours in different locations, eventually hunting not just fish but owls and their landscapes, too.

Early this spring (2023), I lost a good bass on the south coast; it had taken a whiting I was reeling in, so I never really set the hook. When I tried to lift the bass up the rocks, it let go of the whiting (a large Channel specimen) and departed. I’d recently finished writing a book about the marshes and was feeling decidedly valedictory towards them. I was open to doing something else with the summer and the lost bass decided it for me: I was going to be a proper bass fisherman, not just a springer. I’d fish only for bass, touring the local coast and fishing hard until the autumn.

At work, I discussed my plans with one of my best fishing pals, Josh; we teach at the same school and drive the pupils (not to mention the staff) crazy by conversing in angle-speak each time we meet. 4/0s. Pater-Nosters. Pennels. Palomars. Pendulums… It’s like being a member of a secret society- our conversations are all so gloriously nonsensical to everyone else. That’s part of what I like about the angling tribe- you can extend your escape from reality even when you’re back among the civilians. It’s as easy as sitting in the corner of the staff room with my battered copy of BB’s ‘Confessions of a Carp Fisher’. But you’ve really struck gold if you find a fellow fisher-teacher. Josh is a mad crazy fly fisherman and amidst one of our many coded conversations, we decided to team up; I’d spin fish with lures and he’d be the fly guy. In the course of our chats, Josh mentioned a mark we’d spoken of hitting for years; he had some inside information that bass were coming up.

A few afternoons later, we left school and drove directly to the spot, getting there for about half past four. We hit the low tide and took some sizeable fish, most of which were over the keeping limit of 42cm.

Over the next few weeks, we moved around the north coast, catching bass on virtually every trip. Occasionally, we caught fish of 50cm or more, weighing over three pounds. Sometimes, we took braces home for the pot and after a while, I began to feel like we were a pair of old rabbiting men. The low tide marks required long walks out at dusk; the coastal rock plains substituted for the fields I once walked with a rifle. Anyone who’s ever hunted bunnies will forever detect their pellets before anyone else can. It’s the chief tell. I spot them on my school grounds before even the children do. The equivalent giveaway for a bass is the surfacing the fish peform when hunting; last spring, a bass would have to jump clean out of the ocean for me to notice it. By midsummer, I only needed a brief glimpse of a dorsal fin. In September, a risen spike or two was enough.

When I say ‘north coast’, I am referring to any coastline north of Thanet. There, you are fishing directly into the North Sea; the closest of these marks take about fifteen minutes for me to drive to. The south side of Thanet is on the English Channel; I can get there within a one minute walk from my flat. This past summer, Josh and I leapfrogged between the two. But until August, we almost exclusively fished the north side, other than a few probing missions back along the channel. Of all the locations we took in, the best bassing was had via the ‘spits’- those vast rock and chalk formations that jut out at low water, giving you an hour on either side of the tide to fish the farthest patches from the shore. We found several; like all our favoured marks, we gave them nicknames. We called one of our locations ‘Dubya’, after the American president George W Bush. It’s so-called because three bushes grow from the distant undercliff that runs parallel to the mark. Another hallowed ground is named ‘the German’, after a Messerschmitt that went down in the area during the war.

We called one of these offshore spits ‘Pinocchio’; there, one dusk in late July, we experienced a natural phenomenon that is still hard to believe. There were half a dozen other anglers present on or near the spit, each of whom has told and retold the events as they saw them. The coastal pubs, tackle shops and fishing stalls all have their own versions of what occurred:

Anglers unable to wade through the fry… The sea black with fish… Mackerel hunting sandeel. Bass hunting the mackerel. Tunnies hunting the bass!…

I can confirm the last rumour is false. At least from where I was standing. But there were, as always, seals- and they hunted everything.

There is more, much more- and I shall tell it soon.