Fishing

(English version of ‘Vissen’)

I can’t say that I’m afraid of many things, but that disgusting, dirty, slimey animal named Fish gives me the creeps. So when another guest from the hostel asked me to go fishing with him – we both had a day off – I actually wanted to politely turn the offer down. I mean, why the heck would I hold a fishing rod in my hands, and deliberately take the risk of having to take Mother Nature’s most disgusting creature off the hook, while that hook was pierced through its fat lips? No, that was not for me. But I said yes.

I hadn’t travelled all the way to Australia to be hold back by fobies. On the contrary, I am here for the sake of the adventure and experiencing new things. How different was that, when it came to fishing anyway, back home in the Netherlands. I recall the one time that I was keeping an eye on my brother’s fishing rod on the side of a wide ditch for a few minutes. As soon as he walked away to take a leak, I got into a fight with something huge under water and when it finally came to surface, I stared right in the open mouth of an enormous, one meter long pike. Man, I was terrified! Immediately stopped reeling the bastard in and the pike escaped – with that, apparently, the catch of the day. This been some years ago and I hadn’t touched a fishing rod ever since. Until last Thursday.

Marius, who wanted to go fishing with me, asked the reception staff for a good place to fish and soon we were on our way to the spot he’d been told about. There, on the sandy riverbank of the Durham River, just outside of Kununurra, I took my borrowed handline, put some sausage on the hook and threw it into the calm water of the river. Very little happened. Highlights were mainly the quietness, staring at the fishing-line and the float, watching a crocodile going through the water like a submarine that then slowly goes under. On the other side of the coin, we encountered horrendous heat and horseflies, that zoom around your sweating body and suddenly sting. They’ve all been, without exception, executed.

Today we went fishing again. This time round, I bought my own handline, with hooks that are big enough for barramundi – big, fat fish of upto 1 meter 30 long. I enjoy fighting the animals, but getting them off the hook is something I’ll gladly leave upto other people. And because we were with five awesome persons today, that wasn’t a problem at all. I’ll admit it: I caught nothing, despite the prawns I put on the two hooks of the handline. Marius was using a small hook and caught numerous smaller fish. He suggested I’d use one as livebait. That was fine, but I wasn’t going to put that thing on the hook myself, even though this one was only ten centimeters long. “I can’t touch fish,” I said. So he did it. I still didn’t catch anything, but it seems like I’ve found something new to do. It’s super chilled to spend a rare day off with quality people in such a quiet location. Fishing is a good excuse for that, but in all honesty, I don’t think it will ever become a hobby I’m going to be passionate about.