Extreme Fishing Read Free

Jeremy Cadle and two guys who don’t speak a word of English. My Spanish is also poor. It’s pitch black save the lanterns and a few torches, and as the
fish come to the surface I say to Jeremy, ‘Aren’t those a bit big for sardines?’
    ‘No,’ he says.
    ‘In fact, are you’re sure they’re not mackerel?’
    ‘No, Robson, they are sardines,’ he says with the utmost authority.
    ‘Oh, OK,’ I reply, assuming he must be a marine biologist. He is not.
    We film for seven hours, gathering the fish in nets. I do a PTC (piece to camera) about the sardines and the fact that I have never caught so many fish in such a short time. There are thousands
of them. I take one in my hands and say, ‘If it weren’t for sardines, big game fish like marlin wouldn’t exist.’ One of the Spanish guys lightly taps me on the arm but I
ignore him and carry on talking. He coughs loudly. He is ruining my PTC.
    ‘What?’ I say indignantly.
    ‘Eh, Señor, no sardine. Mackerel. Mackerel,’ he smiles, revealing several missing teeth.
    I can hear the blood whooshing around my brain as the pressure increases. I thank our Spanish friend and shoot Jeremy a look that could freeze concrete.
Oh, bloody hell! All the filming is
wasted, utterly wasted, because I haven’t said the word ‘mackerel’ once.
There is no way we can hide this mistake with clever voiceover and editing, and an entire
night’s work is now heading for the cutting-room floor. I am furious with Jeremy but inside I chide myself for being a fool. I knew they were mackerel so why did I doubt myself and trust a
man who doesn’t even own a fishing rod? I look up at the stars and the Milky Way as we head for shore. My Uncle Matheson appears like Obi-Wan Kenobi with a bright aura around him.
    ‘You can do this, Robson, but first you must believe. Trust your instincts,’ he booms majestically across the night sky.
    Elusive Giant Grouper
    Jeremy tries to make amends by telling me the size of the giant grouper I am going to catch this morning. He says, arms outstretched, ‘They grow up to two thousand
pounds.’
Wow
, I think, totally forgetting the fact that he’s not a marine biologist. Grouper do grow to that size, but not here off the coast of Spain. But off we go into the
void, me as trusting as a child. It’s like
Living in Oblivion
with Steve Buscemi.
    We are fishing using glass-bottomed boxes that you put in the water and which act like large goggles. Groupers are stout ambush predators with vast mouths: their jaw pressure is around 800
pounds per square inch; a man’s clenched fist is only 35–40. Their powerful mouths and gills can suck their prey in from a distance, a bit like Simon Cowell. The species are also
hermaphrodites: born female, they can turn into males if there aren’t enough cocks in the shoal, so to speak. (And we thought such versatility between the sexes was a modern phenomenon, when
fish have in fact been gender-bending for millions of years – and a bit more realistically than RuPaul.)
    We submerge the box in the water and wait . . . and wait and wait. There’s bugger-all down there! And after not hours but
three days
what do we catch? Diddlysquat. It has been a
complete waste of time and I have come to the conclusion there’s nothing in the sea. It’s empty. And do you want to know my theory? It’s those damned Spanish fishermen, who, by
the way, we pay millions and millions of pounds every year to fish off the coast of Africa whilst our own British fishermen struggle to survive. And then they come and illegally plunder British
waters as well. Not to mention the bureaucratic idiots who started the practice of discarding, whereby tonnes upon tonnes of fish are thrown back every year because of the stupid EU quota system.
And these muppets get paid like footballers and only work on Wednesdays so as not to spoil both weekends. Don’t get me started! But you can do your bit by supporting Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall’s