Two fishermen strained at the creaking oars, and held the boat in the tide-race close under the Longships lighthouse, whilst I grasped the taut line, at the end of which a sand-eel was spinning. We could see the bass in their play break the surface some twenty yards astern, and every instant I expected that the bait would be seized. What sport those big fish would have given in the strong current! But no, the bass refused to bite at the silvery lure spinning under their very nose. We changed the bait—tried pilchard, squid, ray’s liver, spider-crab; we varied the length of the line, the weight of the lead; we trailed the bait along the edge of the school; in short, we did all we knew. It was of no use. “They’re not on the feed, sir,” said old Matthey, after two hours of this exasperating work. There was no gainsaying this palpable truth, but in my own mind I set the fact down to piscine cussedness. I had come to Sennen for my holidays in order to try and kill a big bass, and it seemed as if the bad luck that had dogged me wherever I had gone in quest of this fish, pursued me still. In West-country phrase, I appeared to be ill-wished. It was on the top of the spring, and we had fished with apparently every condition in our favour except the clearness of the water. “What’s wanted,” said Matthey’s mate as we approached the wooden slip, “is a bit of a tumble, to stir the bottom and thicken the water.”
Sennen Cove.
As scarcely a breath of wind was blowing, and the sky looked like brass, the prospect of rough weather and clouded water seemed very remote. Yet it turned out not to be so. Well may the fishermen of Sennen Cove, who no longer have the guardian spirit their forefathers had, to warn them, watch the sky for premonitory token of storm.
About sundown, on Tuesday the 14th August, a fortnight or so after the tantalising experience related above, a weather-dog was seen near the horizon, which made the older fishermen shake their heads and caused them to be abroad before dawn. Seeing that the glass had fallen to storm-level and that the seabirds with wild cries were making for the southern cliffs, the thirteen boats were brought in from their moorings and everything made snug just in time before the sea became too rough for any craft in the cove to venture out, except the life-boat. At daybreak on the Thursday the sands were littered with seaweed; in places the foam lay in drifts like snow, and for miles inland the farmers must have heard, in the lulls of the storm, the waves thundering against the cliffs. It was not until the morning of Saturday that fishing was possible, even from the shore, and then only at some risk, because of that treacherous run in the water which from time to time costs the life of a rock-fisher. I had little hope of success, for the sea was now as thick as barm, yet I caught a grey mullet of five pounds, and lost another owing to the hook tearing its hold. After this, being wet through with the spray, I made tracks for my cottage on the brow of the cliff.
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.
“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.”
I suggested, quoting the Cornish proverb.
He smiled, and replied, “Well, et’s meant for pelchurs, but et’s true enuf for salmin baas.”
Somewhat cheered by the old fellow’s words, I set out after an early lunch for Roarer Point, as it is called, taking my fishing-tackle with me. The going was heavy, for the sand, beloved of the launce, is loose; moreover the sun beat down mercilessly; but there was some compensation in the scene.
I do not believe the man lives who could have been blind to the beauty of that sea. In an old Eastern poem a Persian is represented as beholding from the desert’s edge a boundless plain of turquoise. The Atlantic on which I looked might have been such a plain, except for the way it heaved; but it was on the breaking wave that the eye dwelt, and found relief from the glare of the beach. How deliciously cool the ever-rising, ever-breaking walls of translucent water looked in contrast with the glowing sands over which the air shimmered and quivered. Overhead a gull floated lazily, its snowy plumage showing finely against the blue vault; and just after I crossed the little stream that trickles down from Vellandreath, a butterfly—I believe it was a red admiral—greatly daring, flitted seaward, and passed out of my sight.
At last I reached the little headland, scrambled over the burning rocks, and gained its extreme point. The water below me was some ten or twelve feet deep, and being outside the line of the breakers, its surface, except when a breath of wind caught it, was without a ripple, and the eye could search every foot of the bottom near the rocks, and for some distance beyond. When I had baited the hook, I threw the line into the water towards the Gwenvor sands, where I could see the approach of any bass that might be coasting towards Sennen Cove, and it might be, watch it swallow the lure, for?—
“The pleasant’st angling, is to see the fish
?Cut with his golden oars the silver stream,
?And greedily devour the treacherous bait.”
Besides the hand-line I had a rod with me, and on this I had rigged a spinning-flight and launce, intending, when the tide rose about a foot higher, to make a few casts from the point.
A seaweed, favourite food of the shy mullet, grew on two big boulders that lay half-buried in the white sand in the water below me. Though semi-transparent it was clearly visible when the rippled surface smoothed. Presently a small crab, as if fearful of being seen, scuttled across the sandy strait between the rocks where rested my tempting bait of ray’s liver.
My attention was chiefly occupied watching the bait and the water between it and the shore on which white-crested waves were breaking; but now and then I looked into a pool at my side. Bright-coloured anemones starred its sides, delicatest seaweeds spread their fronds in the limpid water, and a small fi............