By Monday the sea had moderated enough to allow us to get Matthey’s boat afloat, and we ventured out to our old fishing-ground near the Longships and dropped the killick overboard. The water was in perfect order, and one might compare it to a river clearing after a spate. What sport! I kept catching pollack and bream until I was tired of pulling them in; but, alas! the bass had shifted their quarters, and although we visited their usual haunts we failed to meet with them. The glass continuing to rise, we ventured further along the coast, and spent the rest of the week fishing the three miles of water between the Land’s End and Porthgwarra. Excellent whiffing-ground this is well known to be, and so it proved; but unfortunately the week’s sport was marred by a disaster for which I was entirely to blame. It was on the morning of Thursday, just after the steamer the Lady of the Isles had passed on her way to Scilly. Up till then we had had good sport with pollack, five of these beautiful bronze-coloured fish lying in the basket on the bottom-boards. Shortly after, when near the Rundle Stone, I lost a heavy fish, and with it the spinning-flight, through its boring down and getting entangled in the weeds, as big pollack are wont to do. Of course, I should have held on at any cost and not given an inch of line; and this I determined to do with the next fish that should lay hold of the new eel-tail that was soon trailing in the wake of the boat. I was exchanging a few words with old Matthey, who was holding the sheet—we were sailing to and fro the great tidal stream—when I got into a very heavy fish, to which I held on like grim death. In less time than it takes to tell, the line snapped and a bass which had leapt clear of the water twenty yards astern fell back like a bar of silver into the trough of a wave and disappeared. What word or words escaped me on witnessing the fish—it was uncommonly like a salmon—with the broken trace hanging from its open jaws, I do not remember. At such mortifying moments the tongue is very apt to prove an unruly member, yet old Matthey never opened his mouth. He was like one struck dumb, but his face was as long as a fiddle, and the gaff dropped from his fingers as though it burned them.
With the loss of that fish I really began to despair, and it would have been almost pardonable if I had taken a trip to Camborne to consult the wise man there about removing the spell which, all joking apart, I began to fear hung over me. The following week my chances of success were reduced to a minimum, for the wind veered round, the water close in shore became as smooth as it ever is at the Land’s End, and in a few days was as clear as crystal. The resourceful Matthey recommended me, under these almost hopeless conditions, to fish from the small rocky headland that separates the Sennen from the Gwenvor sands.
Porthgwarra. [Face page 210.
“The hotter et es the closer in they comes, and et’s the biggest baas as hugs the shore.”
“When the corn is in the shock,
The fish is on the rock.”