Part 2 of Elie Godsi’s excellent article.  Part 1 is here.

There are as many different forms of contact as there are forms and methods of fishing. Consider the bob, twitch or slide as a lifeless float tip begins to dance on the water’s surface. One instant it is there and the next, as if by magic it can completely disappear.

Or the almost unbearable agony as a pair of rubbery lips finally breaks surface, nudging and prodding at the floating dog biscuits one by one but ignoring the hookbait.

When touch ledgering at night; the rod, the line, my arm and me, all merged into one: that electric moment when I get a sudden sensation of a rod springing to life in my hand. If all goes according to plan, the bite, the strike and that wonderful solidity of contact become one seamless experience.

And of course, oh joy, the sound of a buzzer waking me up instantly from deep sleep at three in the morning.

Each of these forms of contact has its own unique appeal but they are all characterised by a sudden transition from nothingness in to being: from dead matter in to life. In this sense fishing is pure alchemy. These splinters of time and motion and uncertainty – these are the essence of fishing and yet the hardest of all to convey. No matter that I’ve been carp fishing for over thirty years, no matter how many fish I’ve caught in that time, every time my buzzer sounds, even just an initial bleep, I immediately tense up, a live wire, poised, waiting. If it screams off I am still always surprised, delighted, I have to get there as quickly as I can, every time excited, just as I was when it all began as a child.

I know each time this happens may be the only encounter I have for days and weeks at a time. I’ve been to France a few times and not had a bite all week. The huge size of fish on offer and all that waiting just adds to the power of that moment of contact: all that nothingness comes down to this moment of potential joy or utter anguish and disappointment.

Last October (2009) I went to the wonderful Laroussi and had just five bites all week, landing only two: a brace of gorgeous forties including a personal best ever common at 47lb+.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch over ten forties and a fifty in the last few years. I can remember every detail of every one: the initial bite or run, what time the buzzer roared off or just bleeped, the runs the fish went on, the time it took to play them, the moment of joy when I finally got them over and into the net and saw what I had won. Playing and landing the fish is of course important because it is so deliciously uncertain, knowing how it can all go horribly wrong; how instantly that contact can revert to non-contact. The dreaded stomach churning hookpull. It is these fragments of time and motion, contact and uncertainty that define the whole activity.

Moments of contact can be so elusive, so unpredictable. They can disappear just as quickly as they arrive. That’s why they are so powerful. The concept of positive reinforcement in the psychological literature is well known: give a rat a treat every time it presses a particular button or behaves in a particular way and you can shape it’s behaviour. But there’s an even more powerful method: intermittent reinforcement. Give it a treat every now and then, not every time, and it will repeat what you want it to do more often and with more vigour and determination. This is the same addictive power that gambling has and it is the same for carp fishing.

Finally, I know we can take it all far too seriously, in fact in a way this whole piece is a good example of that! So I leave you with a sobering thought. I knew a woman who liked to dress up as a ‘Borg’ and regularly travelled around the country attending Star Trek conventions. What most people consider to be the ultimate nerd herd. She would go to these gatherings fully adorned in circuitry, flashing lights and face paint and wandered about telling people “resistance is futile – you will be assimilated”. As far as she was concerned, the fact that I get passionate about fish puts us on an equal footing. She does have a point.

Elie Godsi

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