The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  One of the hollows pierces right through the bush and into a wide field behind. It billows with mist and stirs in a playful candyfloss fashion, as if the whole scene were being whipped up with a giant invisible spoon. A large ancient oak tree stands out proud and solid in the field’s centre and its long, loving arms reach out to offer shelter to several dozen sheep. As the traffic on the motorway fades I begin to hear their bleats offering both them and me reassurance. The championship rounds of the night are pulling in. This is real darkness.

  My most recent trip to the forests of New Guinea was just one month before. I had been living with a remote forest people known as the Korowai, as part of a series for the BBC. The Korowai are rightfully famed for their abilities as hunter-gatherers but also for their extraordinary houses, built high on stilts, clear of the forest floor, well away from the floods, mosquitoes and white devils that live down there. It was my second trip out in a long-running project that intends to follow their turbulent lives over the course of a year. The old men I befriended requested I bring a lamp on my return. Instantaneous light. After food security, shelter and clothes it is the next thing on the list before money. I lay in that treehouse every night, silently watching as the lamp I had brought was switched on and off, on and off, and on, again.

  Having light at the flick of a switch is such a luxury that denying yourself it when you do have it feels quite self-indulgent; however, I know that one press of that button will expunge all I can see now in an instant. It will leave me in a puddle of artificial light with the pitch black waiting just outside the reach of the bulb. It’s actually far more frightening than just being in the dark, where I can at least see the shadows. It will take another hour of waiting for my night vision to be restored if I turn on my torch now.

  The bleep of the alarm thumps through the night air like a lump hammer through a breezeblock. My soul leaps clear of my body in fright and I have to race it to the far rod, but just as my world is about to conjoin into one clean strike the line, once again, falls dead. I curse the black as my striking hand shakes. I’m being taunted by unseen forces.

  I remember from my research that the best of the big-eel fishing is to be had two hours before midnight, and two hours after dawn. I check my watch and note that this last take has happened on the stroke of the witching hour and decide that if nothing happens on the lamprey line in another half an hour then I must reel it in. Having not given the crayfish a single thought prior to nightfall, I have long since convinced myself that the canal is absolutely crawling with them and that they’ve definitely relieved me of at least one bait. By the time the half-hour is up I’ve descended further into my own mind and reel in both my lines, fully expecting to find them utterly barren at the hands of the thieving crustacean.

  The baits on both are unmolested. It was the wrong call. I re-bait and re-cast, but I suspect I may well have blown it now.

  After 1 a.m. there is a palpable shift in atmosphere. It feels like someone has drawn a shroud over the entire canal, that a switch has been flicked and all of the life that was, no longer is. The foxes have gone with the rodents, splashes, moths and bats and in their stead the dank smell of the canal fills my nostrils. It is a stagnant aroma, like an old fishtank long after the death of its residents. Even the grass beneath my feet has expelled the last heat from the day now and I begin to feel a creeping chill through the rubber soles of my boots. It is definitely a lot colder and I know the time for catching has passed. My lines hang still and limp, the water makes no noise. I close my eyes and can feel sleep trying to take me.

  I don’t know if I’ve got what you need to take up solo night fishing. In my heart I know I’m just not hardcore enough. There have been other times on the bank when I have thought of going home late at night, but I’ve always eked every last moment of fishing out of an experience, no matter how cold, wet, hungry or uncomfortable I might feel. There is always the chance of that one take which turns around a session, and the list of last-gasp fish I’ve caught in the dead of night stand as a testament to the lingering angler.

  However, it was precisely that ‘never say die’ attitude that eventually led me into so much trouble as an expedition leader. Sometimes my determination tips over into blind stupidity. There is nothing to catch here now and I know it.

  Robert Macfarlane once drew the conclusion that ‘those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion’. The same is probably true of most modern-day adventurers.

  By the end of my twenties I had taken things to the point where I had burnt through relationships, jobs, finances and expedition partners with frightening efficiency. My last girlfriend had walked out on me with the epitaph that I had taken my life to the point ‘that no one can ever reasonably go with you’. She was right. My myopic desire to confirm my theories thinly masked a burning desire to prove myself. To whom, I’m still not even sure.

  I eventually found rock bottom on the jungle-choked river that splits Sierra Leone and Liberia. My hammock was laid in the leaf litter, enveloping me, entombing me, as Plasmodium falciparum malaria pumped its way around my bloodstream and into my cerebral cortex.

  My parents and close friends had all been to great lengths to vocalize their fears for my well-being throughout that decade. I remembered then how Grandad had been the only person who said I would be all right, but years later Grandma told me that he too was terrified. He just hadn’t wanted to say it to my face.

  I fished much less through that decade, but Grandad had persevered in going out to the bank. He started missing takes as he moved into his mid-eighties and all too soon his eyesight began to seriously trouble him. However, he did manage to snare another giant eel from Popham’s Eau. Later he reported back to me how his line had been halfway across the river before he had even noticed the float was missing. It became a serious worry for us all. He was slowing down on a big river that was no place for an old man to fish alone. Dad was convinced he would fall in and drown one day, but he absolutely would not be stopped.

  The last time we fished Popham’s Eau together he fell three times, once on the way to the bank and twice on the way home. The final time he fell I remember shouldering his great weight and how he had looked at me with these great sad brown eyes that I had never seen on him before. The legendary Irish boxer Barry McGuigan, a man whom I knew Grandad admired, once remarked how ‘boxers are the first to know when to quit and the last to admit it’. That was the moment we both knew the game was up. Wordlessly I carried on home, and didn’t speak a word about what had happened to anyone, least of all to Grandad. He never returned to Popham’s Eau, and I never wanted to see the place again either.

  Grandad, the greatest of all the great eels in my life, was sliding towards the abyss of the Sargasso, having lived a fantastic and full life. Whereas I was simply at risk of ending mine prematurely, an adolescent elver who had chosen a stupidly dangerous path that would consume him without hesitation unless something changed.

  I crawled out of the West African forest on my hands and knees and came home. With little idea of what I would do next I quit solo expeditions and moved in with Anna and her boyfriend, James, back in the Fens, back where I needed to be. I picked up my rods and started fishing again, targeting the only fish I could remember how to.

  It was while carp fishing that I found eels again. The familiar tap-tap-tap and back-winding resistance in the fight, the struggle to net and unhook, were throwbacks to times past, but for the first time in my angling life I felt the utter euphoria of being covered in their slime. The eel was back and now so was I.

  A spring of clear water had opened up ahead of me as I pulled into my thirties. It was leading me towards the coast and I knew what I needed to do.

  I pick the reel off the rests and wind both rods in. I don’t need to be like this any more. I shouldn’t have allowed the old selfish me to bring Emma out here but I’m so grateful to the eel for the lesson. Everyone is allowed a relapse.

&nb
sp; We made it to Anna and James’s wedding the very next afternoon and I don’t believe I smelt too bad. Maybe I had had a chance on the canal that night, but I doubted I would ever return to test the theory.

  The Great Game

  Home is a trial, domestic chores a torment, life is dust and ashes until you take up a fishing rod. Wales was my answer to this problem.

  Paul Boote and Jeremy Wade, Somewhere Down the Crazy River (1992)

  I never really liked autumn when I was a child. It was always a tense time. The year was running out, the fishing was getting harder, and September always meant back to school.

  When I was inside, staring at the white iron bars that framed the school radiators, I used to wonder what on earth had just happened to August. It was the only month of the year when we weren’t interned for at least some of the time in classrooms and when it started it felt like it would go on for ever. Then the last Bank Holiday weekend would flash past and I was back here, locked in until Christmas with only the prospect of a few fireworks in November to get me through.

  I felt the days shorten with quiet inevitability; nature’s way of telling us that our time on earth is limited, another circuit around the sun. I would blow hot air onto my chilly fingers, stare at those radiators, and feel a sense of real disquiet.

  These days I feel neither the sense of desperation to catch nor the feeling of entrapment of autumns past. The river crackles with tension, and the fish can feed exceptionally hard during this period if you can get a break in the weather. After a long, late summer, and the blank night with the eel, I started to catch really well again. For two nights running I ended up in the water in my pants: the first instance was on a remote Forestry Commission lake where a robust, double-figure wild carp snagged me up in a rotting bed of lilies, and I had to fetch it, and the second was a tussle with a big barbel which ran my line into a rocky snare and refused to lift its head until I had made my way downstream of its lie. I fished the magisterial River Wye with Dad, getting him onto his first big brace of chub, as happy for him as if I had caught the fish myself, and landed a pair of picture-perfect grayling trotting a fat float loaded with maggots through fast water above Cardiff.

  My slate is wiped clean in August and it has long since become my second spring, responsible for delivering me more fresh starts than any other time of the year; and some of the biggest fish of my life.

  The week after I had wrestled with my first eel for twenty years my life took a major turn. I had been visiting my friend, and occasional boss, Steve at his cottage down on the Gower coast in South Wales. We had supposed to go on a fishing trip, but, having nearly lost the family car in the turning tides around Port Eynon, we wisely decided to call it a day. I thought that was pretty much it in terms of the weekend’s dramas, but then he slid a large manila envelope my way across his garden table.

  In it was a thick document with a colourful picture of a mask-wearing man stood waist deep in azure blue seas on the cover. The photo caption told me this was an indigenous shark caller from the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, and the title told me this was a pitching document for a new BBC series.

  While I had been embroiled in my existential (and malarial) crisis in Sierra Leone, Steve, who runs an independent documentary company in Cardiff, together with my director friends Jamie and Will, had pitched me as a presenter to BBC Two. Hunters of the South Seas was set in the South Pacific and would see me live cheek by jowl with the last subsistence hunter-gatherers of the sea. Sensationally, BBC Two had agreed to let us all make it together.

  ‘Is this for real, mate?’ I asked nervously. He laughed, and forced a beer into my hand. Not one season after I had quit expeditions, and just two years after I had sworn I would never work another day in the world of television, I was sat, in Cardiff, penning my name against a primetime project. After a decade of juggling my careers in both adventure and television it seemed the hand of fate had finally found a way of meeting my passions in the middle. I couldn’t have been happier.

  Well, actually, I probably could have. I needed to move back to Cardiff immediately to start researching potential communities and locations, and, in my haste to get settled, I signed for quite possibly the loneliest single man’s flat in history.

  The hallway was unlit, the windows were cracked, and every appliance, from the fridge to the oven, had a major fault. When I flicked on the lights for my first evening alone the switch simply crumbled backwards into a giant cavity in the wall. I called the landlord immediately but found his mobile to be strangely ‘out of service’ since the rapid collection of my deposit and non-refundable two months’ advance rent.

  Fishing provided a release. My new place was in a supposedly rough part of town known as Riverside, but if you can look beyond the concrete, graffiti and grit, there was a wonderful stretch of the River Taff to discover.

  The Taff flows for just forty-five miles from its high source in the Brecon Beacons to the sea at Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. It is one of the steepest and shortest descents of any river in Wales but it packs in the features along its length. There’s world-class trout fishing in its upper reaches and some of the biggest chub and barbel in Britain towards its mouth, but hardly anyone ever seems to fish it.

  I had lived in Cardiff for a couple of years before but had only thought to fish the Taff once. I found it a difficult and wild river, met at a time when I was interested in neither. I caught one stringy roach and turned my gaze back to the carp ponds, but now I was back, and, living alone, it felt like the time was right to give the river more effort.

  The Taff was nothing like the rivers and drains of the Fens. My home waters were slow and sluggish, manmade receptors used to keep the fields from sinking under water. The Creek was almost completely static and the only times the big drains ever moved were if someone had cranked open the sluice gates at Denver. The Taff stirred under its own immense gravitational pull. When it rained on the hills the water would flow with a rabid intention towards the coasts, swelling and raging with an angry brown foam that boiled with litter, streamer weed and sometimes even entire trees.

  Thinking I could rock up and fish this river effectively because I had experience in the Fens was like believing I could look after a wild wolf because I had once owned an Airedale terrier. It took many weeks just to learn the basics, and months more before I would even come close to catching a reasonable fish.

  The first lesson was that using the same tackle and tactics every day was a definite no-no. Different fish came on in different conditions, and the River Taff was a living, breathing ecosystem that changed its moods continually. Sometimes you would need a heavy single bait rolling along the deck and other days you could get away with light float tackle and a steady trickle of grubs. There were days you could wade out across crystal-clear waters and trundle a bait right along the middle of the river, and others when one misplaced foot would see you swept to the north coast of Somerset. Through trial and error I eventually discovered there was nearly always somewhere you could cast a line, though, and, in spite of the Taff’s reputation for being devoid of life after decades of industrial punishment, I found there were some fantastic fish just waiting to be caught.

  I can pinpoint the precise moment fishing the Taff became more than just a distraction from my hovel of a flat. It was early autumn, but the river’s water was still warm and I was able to wade in barefoot. I cast a large golden spinner towards a weeping willow tree on the far bank. My mind was utterly blank, locked in the trance-like state that only spinning produces, when an explosion, something like a silvery pipe-bomb, bowed my rod and electro-shocked my soul.

  I heard it once said by a crinkly old angler that just as a watched kettle never boils, an over-considered fish never bites. I didn’t even realize there were salmon in the Taff, but by the time my brain had processed the cause of the assault the fish had thrown the hook and vanished. I cast again, and again, and again, till my arms ached and darkness fell all around me, but I couldn’t seem t
o raise the fish for another round.

  It was a big salmon, of that I was in no doubt: returned from the sea to spawn and recovering its strength somewhere out in a hidden hole just off the main flow. My spinner had invaded its personal space. It hadn’t snapped at my spinner to feed on it, like a pike or a perch might – the take had been violent, GBH on the line. I just hadn’t been prepared.

  I was back every night through that season but the salmon proved to be exceptionally elusive. My lack of success wasn’t down to an absence of fish: every time the river rose a conveyor belt of fresh sea-run salmon moved upstream and into the holes outside the city park. I knew they were there because they always declared their position in the last hour of light, leaping clean of the river and flaying their silver sides with water. Perhaps it was just an effort to blast irritating sea lice from their bodies, but it was hard not to feel like I was being ridiculed.

  Carp fishing had made me soft. After weeks of effort my fingers and thumbs had blistered and calloused into layers of hardened skin on my casting hand. I hadn’t wanted to catch a fish this badly since the winter of ’92 and that first pike. This was way beyond a simple distraction now. I had to catch that fish.

  The American humorist Ian Frazier noted how ‘casting for steelhead is like calling God on the telephone, and it rings and rings and rings, hundreds of rings, a thousand rings, and you listen to each ring as if an answer might come at any moment, but no answer comes, and no answer comes, and then on the 1,001st ring, or the 1,047th ring, God loses his patience and picks up the phone and yells, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR?” in a voice the size of the canyon.’