Extreme Fishing Read Free Page A

incredible ‘Fish Fight’ campaign to bring an end to the madness and terrible waste.
    Back on the boat, my patience has been tested to the max by the ‘sardine’ and grouper debacles. I talk to Jeremy about how the show is going and he tells me he thinks it’s
going swimmingly. I say, ‘But we didn’t catch anything today.’ He replies, ‘Robson, it’s called fishing, not catching.’ I want to strangle him.
    Seeing as we have caught bugger-all so far, save the catfish, Hamish suggests we push on to the Canary Islands to see what we can find there. Everyone is winging it and
it’s not a comfortable feeling. Behind the scenes, Hamish is foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. He has seen the rushes of Spain – uncut footage that will later be edited into the
final programme – and says we have no more than five minutes of a show. This really is our last-chance saloon.
    ‘Go and catch a marlin, Robson,’ he says on the phone to me.
    ‘Easier said than done,’ I say. ‘Haven’t you read Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
?’
    ‘Make it happen. I believe in you.’
    Uncle Obi-Wan Matheson echoes the sentiment in my head: ‘Believe.’
    But today, much like the rest of the trip, there is plenty of behind-the-scenes drama that the TV audience doesn’t get to see: it transpires that our marlin fisherman in
Tenerife, the one we are so heavily relying on to save the show, has had a skinful the night before and crashed his boat! So our first task is to find another contributor. Mercifully the production
team manages to track down a Scottish guy called John with a big boat. Crisis averted.
    I shake hands with our Scottish fisherman, who is tanned like leather. He has brought his wife and another old seadog along and boy do they all love to drink. It’s like a bleeding episode
of
Eldorado
.
    ‘How’s it looking today?’ I ask.
    ‘Looks great. Great weather – nice and hot,’ he says.
    ‘Fantastic. So what brought you to Tenerife?’
    ‘The sunshine.’
    ‘Not the fishing?’
    ‘Nope, the sunshine.’
    It quickly becomes apparent that this guy isn’t remotely interested in fishing; he’s just an old sailor who likes going round the islands topping up his tan.
    ‘When did you last catch something?’
    ‘Haven’t caught anything in, er, three years.’
    Oh. My. God. 1
    We end up fannying around with Scottish John for two days and – surprise, surprise – we catch nothing. I’m in mental decline.
    After a day of not even catching a sea cucumber, the biggest insult to an empty-handed fisherman is to make him taste another man’s fish, but the team is running out of
ideas. I look at the camera and say, ‘It’s called escolar – because it looks like it’s wearing reading glasses like an academic or “scholar”. It’s also
called butterfish.’
    The escolar is a bottom feeder and scavenger that hoovers up the dead, decomposing things that lie on the ocean floor – a bit like a vulture does on land. Part of the snake mackerel
family, it is highly toxic and has to be prepared in a certain way to make it safe for humans to ingest. It’s so dangerous that eating this fish is banned in some countries – but not
here. The islanders absolutely adore it; in fact, they can’t get enough of it. Apparently it has a lovely buttery taste – if you get it right . . .
    Joni Cejas, a restaurant-owner and chef, is going to show me how to prepare this dangerous fish. He is a silver-haired Spanish Del Boy who has his fingers in lots of pies, and now fish. A large
escolar is waiting for me on a butcher’s slab in the kitchen. The leathery prehistoric creature has large, frightening eyes, razor-sharp teeth and an obsidian tongue. I only have to take one
look at it to know I don’t want to eat it. It’s as if my response has been evolutionally hardwired to my brain because an ancestor way, way back in time, some 60,000 years ago, once ate
one of these fish and puked himself inside out and