When you start fishing, you are in unexplored seas, venturing into a New World. The next headland is a great Cape to be skirted cautiously exploring. Keep that feeling around you at all times, because that is something that kayaking pays you for your physical effort. Those “effortless transports” such as the car that we structure of our lives around mean we usually never arrive anywhere... . When you are paddling, you are getting there.
But for others, you are like a stray cat on their bird-table.
If all fishermen are territorial, lobster fishermen are positively paranoid.
When I was a child, we went on holiday to Burton Bradstock in Dorset, where there still some beach fishermen. They were after sprats and mackerel, for which they set beach seines. This meant rowing a boat round out off the beach, hopefully surrounding a shoal, then dragging the net ends in to land the catch. My dad was a good size, so was a welcome heaver on one of the ropes. This way of fishing meant the fishermen co-operated, taking it in turns to sit up ion the cliff watching for the bait-birds diving that marked a shoal. If they missed a shoal, it was gone.
Lobsters meanwhile are territorial. They move into a hole and sit tight.
(Now the movements of lobsters have been the subject of debate and dissent for years amongst fisherman, though they only talk of such matters unguardedly out of season, but that is for another time.)
Lobsters are also aggressive, as you will see from the number of ‘cripples’ in the process of growing new claws that you will catch. They are well armed warriors.
Once a lobster is caught, that territory does not seem to get filled straight away. So if someone else has got pots on choice ‘ground’, they might be catching lobsters you could have had, damn them!
No one really wants the others to know what they are catching and where.
In Aberystwyth there were glorious moments of truth when there was a shared “landing” to a wholesaler, and fisherman saw the number of baskets of lobsters their rivals hauled up the wall. Sometimes a fisherman had chanced upon a new bit of ‘ground’ and would land some unusually large lobsters. A fevered atmosphere would develop, as the others tried to work out where that ground was.
I wouldn’t say that fishermen are misanthropic, but the sea does attract loners; whose tolerance of other human-beings in their space is often on a short fuse. Don’t forget it attracted you too, so you probably have a lot in common. When you see a speed-boat cavorting around your pot buoys, you'll feel as they do.
The worst reactions I’ve noticed to anyone moving onto 'their pitch' come from the younger or newcomer professional fishermen, keen to mark themselves apart from those bloody ‘part-timers’.
Part of the special nature of the sea is its lack of intense human presence and policing, so if you have trouble with other fishermen, try to sort it out by talking rather than involving the police etc. They haven't got a clue about sea-law anyway, but you'll have difficulty getting them off the case if you do involve them, as they love an excuse to hang around by the sea.
You have AMAZING rights as a kayaker-fisherman that I’ll probably go into next blog, but that won’t do you much good if you don’t get on with the existing local community of fishermen and anglers.
The sea is a lonely enough place without lacing it with enemies.
Just remember that they felt the same as you all those years ago, going round that headland for the first time into unexplored seas.