Gone fishing. Sort of.

What happens when you almost lose the (Boy) will?

There’s a particular kind of madness that takes hold of you when you’ve spent more than a decade figuring out a coastline.

Every reef. Every gully. Every tide state that turns a blank into a red letter day. The exact moment in a flood when the fish switch on like someone’s flicked a switch in the deep. You can’t value that knowledge. You certainly can’t Google it. You earn it, session by session, mostly by getting it catastrophically wrong for years until one day, almost by accident, it all makes sense and fish like this become the norm not the exception.

I had that on the North Norfolk coast. I really did.

And then I moved to Brighton.

What I didn’t fully account for - couldn’t have accounted for - was how much of my love for fishing was tangled up in the people I did it with.

The North Norfolk Mafia. You know who you are. The pre-dawn, relentless WhatsApp messages trying to get laziest and best of us out of bed. The forensic, entirely pointless debates about whether a 4lb bass is actually a 5lb bass if you hold it slightly further from the camera. The competitive blanking. The even more competitive catching. The miles walked, often in complete darkness for the absolute privilege of standing on a sandbar at first light watching the world wake up, rods bent, while completely losing our tiny minds.

Boy Dan and the plentiful near death experiences I followed him through to catch just one more fish. Boy Paul carrying cooking stove and provisions on top of all his gear across salt marsh and bog and beach while we just took the piss and berated him for not bringing the tomato sauce. Boy Will annoyingly mastering the art of the night bag up better than pretty much anyone I know. And the banter, the glorious, never ending banter.

(thin, and definitely smaller than mine)

I miss all of it with a physical ache that I wasn’t expecting.

Now don’t get me wrong Brighton is, objectively, a brilliant place to fish.

The ground down here looks extraordinary. Reef forever, structure, esturaies - all the ingredients. The bass are here. I know they’re here. The sea knows I know they’re here.

But there are also, I have discovered, rather a lot of other people who’ve had the same idea. People who have - and I want to be clear that I mean this in the most diplomatic way possible - absolutely no business being on marks at five in the morning that a non local, outsider, vagrant would much prefer to enjoy alone.

I am aware this makes me the most entitled tool in the box but the Norfolk coast has ruined me. Years of walking miles to find exquisite, howling isolation. Just the birds, the (despicable) seals, the tide and a friend or two who are equally unhinged.

Down here I turned up for my first proper session to find what appeared to be a small festival.

(To be fair that’s a picture of Weybourne NN in the summer not Brighton but you get the idea)

The next time I went, I did catch something. Almost.

A decent fish? Felt good for a few glorious seconds - the old electricity, the old panic, the old joy - and then it was gone. Shook its head and secured its heartbreaking freedom, as they do.

But as I stood there alone on what I have to admit was a stunning mark, I couldn’t help but catch myself refelcting upon a rather dark thought. After everything I’ve learnt, painfully figured out, after all those fish and unforgettable moments in Norfolk, can I actually be bothered anymore?

Can down here possibly match what I had up there? Or did I leave the best of my fishing behind me along with the best of my fishing friends?

I don’t have a tidy answer to that yet.

But I’ve been here before. Every mark I know, I once didn’t. Every fish I’ve ever caught on new ground was preceded by a long, humbling stretch of not catching anything at all.

The passion is still there. I think. It’s just currently buried under a layer of grief for a coastline and a crew of people who made it what it was.

Give me a season. Ask me again in October.

If you’re new to bass fishing or want to get started, I’m now offering 1:1 sessions online and in person in Brighton — details on the about page.