F2F Fishing for Secrets by Four Communications Ltd

from FoRk to fork journeys in local food

Fishing for secrets

Fishing for SEcrets The ways of the fishermen can seem almost as weird and mysterious as those of the fish they pursue. Simon Wright takes a trip downstream to uncover the life of brine. Words Simon Wright Photography Warren Orchard

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riving through Carmarthen in the small hours of the morning, sometime in the early nineties when I was new in town. On my left the river, a flicker of silver in the blue black between the silhouettes of trees. Nothing moves, the town is in its bed and on the road it’s just me and the moonlight. In the car the heater’s on, the radio is playing soft and my mind is somewhere far, far away. And then, in the blue black, six figures of dread. Weird sentinels, bigger than men, marching in sinister file along the river bank. Creatures with great shells like mutant turtles or immense black beetles that have reared up on their hind legs. My heart freezes at the sight, I hit the kerb, recover on instinct and look urgently in the mirror. There is nothing to see but the night and that’s enough – I drive on and away, shaken, disturbed, at a loss, in truth, petrified. I know not what I have witnessed. Twenty or so years later and I’m standing on the same waterside shaking hands with one of these monsters. His name is Malcolm and he has a boat on his back. Strapped into a carapace of black fibreglass, half-egg, with D6 daubed on the side in white paint he introduces me to David, Andrew and five others of their ilk all similarly armoured, holding paddles and clutching silky bunches of gathered nets. These are the odd beings I beheld with a shiver that dark and distant night. They are the coracle men and they come neither from a distant planet nor the sewer, but their ways are strange, as we shall discover. Whilst I know little of the coracle men I know far less of the fish they pursue. But then it’s not just me; much of what goes on under the surface of the water remains murky to mankind in general. Even these fishermen, who hunt with the instincts of seals, whose wily ways distil the tricks of a dozen generations in their rituals of entrapment, know little of their prey. These wonder fish who are born in the high

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reaches of the river but journey deep into the mighty sea, who may return to their birthplace once a year or once a lifetime, who may live to fifteen or twenty years and who may, on that journey home, be caught by two men in boats the size of puddles with a forty foot net stretched between them - but most likely will not. Here in Wales the fish is known as the sewin, elsewhere it’s a plain sea trout. The latter title might lack the magic but it tells you the simple truth – what we have here is a river trout with wanderlust. Whilst others choose to remain in the waters in which they were born, the sewin makes its teary farewells and disappears out of sight, heading downstream, until the River Towy widens between the towns of Llansteffan and Ferryside and the straitjacket of the river gives way to the freedom of the open sea, where the final drops of fresh water are drowned in brine. Like all epic travellers they will come back changed. The flimsy adolescent will return a powerful, majestic, imperious adult. Six to twenty pounds of sleek, wild, mercury muscle, fattened and seasoned in the Irish Sea and now whipping its way upstream in the Towy. A beautiful fish – perhaps the most beautiful. Around here they have a saying that “God practised on the salmon but with the sewin made perfect”. Well, as far as the eating goes, I have no doubt they are right – but to talk of eating is to get way ahead of ourselves because first we must catch a fish. In the hat, brass discs, each bearing a number. It’s hardly the national lottery but I’m aware that I’m honoured to be asked to pull out the tokens. This draw will go some way to deciding the success or failure of their night working the river. Come out first and you get the pick of the water and the odds on netting fish that may be worth around sixty or seventy pounds are significantly shortened. Come out last and you have your work cut out. I feel the gaze of eight men hard upon me.

Fishing for Secrets

“‘in the blue black, six fifIGures of dread

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Fishing for Secrets

There are two sets of rules to this game. There are the ones written in black and white by the authorities; statutes about net lengths, licenses, length of seasons, tagging and the like that have become ever more complex and constraining as the years have gone on and the sewin have become ever more scarce. Once the rivers teamed with these fish but now they are sparse. As to why? It depends who you ask – seals, super trawlers, dams, acid water and the net fishermen themselves are all cast as villains by one group or another depending on who they want to get their hooks into. It seems far-fetched to imagine that the archaic methods used by a handful of coracle men, barely changed for centuries, are much of a factor but they are way easier to net than a foreign factory fishing vessel way out in the Irish Sea. Something has to be seen to be done and as ever the small fish are easier to fight. Then there are the other laws, the ones passed down through the generations of fishermen in defiance of anarchy and in the knowledge that the ultimate legislator is nature itself. The rules that have been bickered about, bent and forged straight again for centuries. The ones that demand that these little metal tags are drawn without prejudice from a fisherman’s cap and the ones that insist that once the men are upon the water no nets are set until seven stars can be seen in the night sky. For this pursuit must take place in darkness. These fish are not twp, if they see a net they know it is to be avoided, a trap set by the men now cupped in the delicate palms of their tiny craft. Skating the surface making scarcely a ripple, their paddles – flicking figures of eight – barely tickle the river, their silent shadows disappearing into the night as the light finally

fades. Above them on the roads and bridges, modern life rumbles on – headlights, the hum and cough of motors – but on the river, time lags centuries behind, moving only at the pace of this gentle dance of coracles – two boats kissing and then parting, joined by the lattice that now sweeps the wide water between them, moving downstream together in perfect time, but hardly moving at all. Within ten minutes there is almost nothing to be seen or heard of the fishermen from my place on the riverbank. The only sign that the eight men I saw enter the water are still out there is the occasional charcoal figure drifting across a patch of orange light cast by a street lamp. Time passes slowly and then, the flash of a torch, voices raised for the first time in half an hour, the slapping of water and a sharp rap that echoes off the stone walls of the bridge. A first sewin of the night and there it is, lying in the short grass beside the path, shining in the torchlight a fish of about six pounds in weight, one of only half a dozen that will be caught in the four nets tonight, eight men working for up to six hours – it’s like panning for silver, a triumph of hope over expectation. The sun is up and the river has turned to mud. Driving back along the riverside and past the cages in which the coracles are kept, the giant turtles are now sleeping in their racks. Leaving the Towy behind as it bends south towards the coast I head through the hills in the direction of Cardigan Bay – that greedy bite in the West Wales coastline that stretches all the way from Bardsey Island in the north to Strumble Head in the south. I’m driving through Pembrokeshire now, just before

A dozen or so stalls with green and white striped awnings. I’’ll confess it’s the kind of cheerful scene I’d more associate with rural France www.fork2fork.wales

Fork2Fork on tour

there’s a warmth of its own

in this little community of food producers and the place has already crept its way into my affections it becomes Ceredigion. In the village of St Dogmaels there is a sign for the local Food Market and I follow it into a narrow lane that quickly opens up into a place of unexpected quiet beauty. To the right there’s a green field with an abbey in the distance, to the left a village pond; still, duck strewn water held back to power the wheel of the whitewashed mill. Between these two is the little market of a dozen or so stalls with green and white striped awnings. I’ll confess it’s the kind of cheerful scene I’d more associate with rural France and I can only wonder how it is I’ve never been here before. In truth I’m slightly ashamed. There may only be a handful of traders but they fit the space perfectly. There is flour from the neighbouring mill (the bread they bake with it has already been snapped up), sausages, goats’ cheese, jams, chutneys and honey, cider and juice from local orchards. It’s getting towards the end of the market and the stallholders are wandering over to chat to each other, commentating on the day’s trading, helping each other to food and drink. It helps that the sun is shining but there’s a warmth of its own in this little community of food producers and the place has already crept its way into my affections. And that’s before Mandy Walters presses lunch upon me. The freshest dressed Cardigan Bay crab with a couple of Welsh cakes – “just in case”. Mandy’s husband Len and son Aaron fish in Cardigan Bay and on the River Teifi. All year round they catch crab and lobster. In the summer there is spider crab too and they hand line for mackerel, sea bass and pollock. In the winter there are scallops. From April to August they fill the hours that remain by fishing in coracles and seine netting on the River Teifi too. In this master of all trades way, it is still possible it seems to make a living as a small fisherman on the West Wales coast. Twenty one year old Aaron picks me up on the shore at nearby Patch and we motor out to the Glas Y Dorlan where his father is waiting for us. The boat is a gnarled

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mass of heavy iron, winches, ropes and nets. I spot early on that the back appears to have been sliced off leaving an open slipway to the sea. It reminds me of a car ferry when the doors have been opened, but I’m also reminded that is something that only happens when they are in dock otherwise the consequences are grim. Len says it was a brainwave he had a few years back to make it easier to put the lobster pots out and admits he was nervous about it at first. For me that feeling persists. But it’s a fine day and the sea seems pretty calm – until we get past the headland into the open ocean and the little peaks grow jagged and steep until we are slamming into them at a rate of one every couple of seconds and I learn too late that standing vaguely behind the cabin is insufficient protection from the spray that spews back with increasing ferocity. The wind is colder out here too, especially when you are wet through. About half a mile out we stop to pull in the pots. A line of two dozen or so stretched out on the seabed. Len and Aaron bring them in, empty them of brown crab and blue black speckled lobster and stack the empty cages. It’s tough work carried out at pace as the tubs fill with a writhing mass of shellfish and the pile of empty pots grow higher. And just as with the coracle men it’s as if there is a ballet for big blokes going on here in the cramped confines of this tiny boat, littered with machinery and equipment – father and son not speaking a word but knowing exactly what the next move must be and who will be doing it. For them this is an easy trip on a sunny day, there will be many more on dark grey days in freezing temperatures and ugly seas and I wonder at youthful Aaron who has chosen this life from among many. But then these are not just jobs, they are crafts, demanding skills known only to a few. In these ways, steeped in tradition and culture, the greatest things to eat are gathered from the rivers and the seas, sourced and sold locally – they are all the sweeter for it.

Fishing for Secrets

these are not just jobs, they are crafts, demanding skills known only to a few

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Food Lore & Legends

WELSH SUPERFOOD

IN THE PINK

Sewin (sea trout) will only feed at sea and the colour of its flesh will be affected by its diet which may include mysids and shrimp, giving it a distinctive light pink colour with good muscle tone and a fresh fish smell.

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Laverbread has a very high vitamin D content and miners were fond of it as it helped mitigate against long hours spent underground with no or low exposure to the sun’s rays. Richard Burton called laverbread ‘Welshman’s caviar’ and early records refer to laver being eaten as a survival food by people fleeing from Viking invasions.

LARGE COD & CHIPS The Welsh rod-caught record for cod was caught off Barry Island in 1976, weighing in at almost 20kg, enough to make over 350 portions of fish and chips.

Something fiFIshy

Tenby was one of the earliest Welsh herring fishing centres – its Welsh name Dinbych-y-Pysgod means ‘little fort of the fishes’. For centuries vast herring quantities were landed, salted and exported to the Mediterranean. Herring preparations include kippers, bloaters, rollmops or soused and Swedish fermented and canned ‘surströmming’ is allegedly the world’s most unpleasant smelling food!

ALIVE, ALIVE OH Cockles are small saltwater clams widely used in cooking throughout the world, but are especially popular in Wales. The Magna Carta grants every citizen the right to collect up to eight pounds of cockles from the foreshore.

ANCIENT DEPTHS

Bala Lake is the largest natural lake in Wales being four miles long and one mile wide and is home to an endangered white fish called the Gwyniad. Found nowhere else on the planet it came to be in Wales when its ancestors were trapped in the waters there at the end of the last Ice Age.

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We're now at our journeyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s end... ...however to start your own food and drink odyssey visit www.fork2fork.wales and chose one of the hundreds of direct food locations available just a stone's throw away, be it a farmersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; market, farm shop, festival or at a farm gate.