Boiling at Pinocchio

The cliffs behind the Pinocchio coastal spit are full of butterflies in late July; the land above is unpromenaded and has been left to to nature. Lavenders, sea pinks and moon daisies decorate the path that leads across the fields and down to the bay.

In the final school days, the aroma was scratchy in my throat, yet I yearned for it so much that teaching became almost unbearable. Every day, just after four, a race would occur between myself and the music teacher, Josh. Who would be the quickest to reach their car? Who would choose the best route and avoid the traffic? Who would be the first to reach Pinocchio and start casting?

Arriving first was the ultimate pleasure, almost as nice as the panic across the fields and down the path. All the time, the salt would be rising in our nostrils, challenging us to walk faster until finally, we’d be underneath the cliffs and enjoying the brief belt of soft sand before the rocks.

The rear end of the spit is a magical walk, full of pools populated by blennies and crabs that get larger as you near the sea. At points, the tide rushes in and creates lagoons; you see mullet crossing between the ever shifting banks of weed. One angler I met told me he saw a huge bass in one of the inlets and I believed him, although I never saw it. I also never caught in these areas, neither did Josh.

Reaching the low tide mark, we’d have an hour or two to wade about, fall over and sometimes do some fishing. Occasionally, we fished past dusk on a rising tide and had to wade back through purple waters that reached above our navels.

By the time the school term ended, my freezer was filling with bass and I was a contented angler. Josh tied me some clousers and I attached one a foot up the line as a ‘teaser’. This makes the lure look like it’s chasing the fly. This caught me more fish than I deserved and was the technique I used when the sea began to simmer one evening in late July, over at Pinocchio’s.

The bass had been absent for a few days so I was pleased when some mackerel appeared on a six ‘o’ clock tide; by darkness, they’d become a shoal- I caught several, each of around the taking size of twelve inches.

The next afternoon, another shoal joined them; their stamp was a year or so bigger and most of them came in at around fourteen inches. For the best part of the afternoon, the mackerel didn’t actually feed; instead, they spent hours corralling the baitfish (micro mullet and bass fry) into the shallows, before rushing in at low water. Then, the tide turned silver and the sea stewed with fry, thousands of which jumped ashore and right into the beaks of the assembled seagulls and crows. The latter species had arrived at the first bubbling, a couple of hours’ prior.

I took my fill then watched until the water rose. Half an hour before the spit flooded, a shoal of bass arrived and hunted loudly, giving themselves away by jumping and splashing over the breakers. Together with the mackerel and the fry, an area of water the size of a few tennis courts began to explode. I tried to catch some bass but they didn’t like my lure.

The next dusk proved the last of ‘the boiling’, but it was by far the best. Both the mackerel shoals remained inshore but were joined by an enormous shoal of bass; the word had gone round the pubs and by now there were nine anglers fishing on or near the spit. Six were men I didn’t know. Then there was Josh and his friend Eli, who’d travelled down from the midlands to fly fish.

Eli had never taken a bass before on the fly; both he and Josh turned up nice and early, perhaps at three in the afternoon; the low tide was around eight. Both the bass and the mackerel were moving but did not start to feed until around half past six. The water was constantly being disturbed around the edges of what seemed a giant underwater holding pen for young prey fish and now, also sand eels. Whereas the previous night, we measured this area in tennis courts, it was now more like football pitches. We cast into it but pulled in only fry and sandies; there were so many that sometimes half a dozen came back impaled on our hooks. Waste not want not- we threw them straight to the waiting crows, and later, the gulls.

Eli is a fine angler and never became despondent but by six ‘o’ clock, we were becoming a little concerned that he might be going back to the Black Country without a bass.

Half an hour later, first the mackerel, then the bass attacked. And they kept on attacking for two hours. A huge area, black with fry several hundred yards across, blew up. It was like being in a giant jacuzzi; the noise was akin to planes taking off and we had to shout over each other to be heard. Everywhere, neon and silver rockets came charging into the shallows. All about my waders, I saw them come streaking in, before swirling and leaping out of the ocean like kingfishers, with mouthfuls of fry; in fact, some bass had sandeels crawling out of their gills.

By eight ‘o’ clock, each angler- including Eli- must have taken at least twenty or thirty sizeable bass each- every catch was above 42 cm; most were two and half and some reached four pounds. Afterwards, I prepped my catch alongside some of the unfamiliar anglers I mentioned; every man agreed that none of us had ever seen a run like this before in our lifetimes.

Lots of mackerel were caught but the previous two days of feeding had slowed them down. The bass had only arrived in numbers on this third day; most of the initial corralling had been carried out by the mackerel shoals, so the bass probably couldn’t believe their luck. When we gutted them, their bellies were full of sandeels, which have an aniseed scent locally. I kept a brace for the pot; I ate one the next evening and froze the other. I cooked it last night for my father and myself; it tasted of pernod.

It’s November now and ‘The Boiling’ already seems a long time ago, which I suppose is why I’m trying to revive it in these diaries. In the immediate aftermath, Josh went out to the States and caught some American bass; I stayed home but went south, to the other side of the isle, and fished the English channel. I hunted a spit I’ve nicknamed ‘the German’, down to a Messerschmitt that crashed there during the war. I caught lots of good bass; one night near the end of August, I took a brace of near five-pounders, just gone midnight.

Some weeks in August, I was fishing twice a day. It’s the nights I miss most- even more than the dusk runs- and all that glorious hopping about on the rocks under the summer moon.

Both Josh and I are back to work now. We teach in a three-hundred year old farmhouse out on the Minster Marshes; winter is approaching and I intend to visit some owls soon. I have a new stream to follow, too. I made friends with a solitary buzzard in the valley there, three winters back. I’ve returned each cold season, but never properly fished the area. Josh has tied me some amazing flies so I’ll try them out there.

I’ve already caught a few pike this autumn, including a poor, one-eyed specimen that saddened me and set me thinking back to Pinocchio’s pure, silver bass.

In my dreams, I see simmering and hear boiling. Mainly, I hear the noise of the third night; like the sound of a Boeing taking off. But it’s distorted now and not even this writing has taken me back as I wished it would.

Time is relative, though, and perhaps I’ll remember it better in years to come.

Until then, I’ll fish on.