Handlining By Nick Fisher

Handlining

By Nick Fisher

The most expensive rod I ever bought was dangerously close to three hundred quid. It didn’t come with a reel, any line or even so much as a hook. A while back I bought a handline for less than three quid. Sure, it was only a lump of flat wood wrapped in thick monofilament, but it came with hooks, a weight, a beefy swivel and a whole lot of soul.

On foreign trips, I’ve found myself frequently going back to basics, leaving my rod in its case and getting out a handline instead.

It’s the sort of fishing equivalent of ‘going native’. Giving up all I’ve learnt in the civilised carbon-fibre fuelled world of modern angling, in exchange for the primitive feel of a coil of thick mono between my toes and the skin-nipping rub of a heavy line running through my fingers.

When my dad took me for mackeral fishing trips out in a charter boat off Largs on the west coast of Scotland, circa 1966, we used handlines. Bright orange things with a spiky circular weight on one end and an H-shaped frame of pine to wrap the line on the other.

We’d lob the weight off the boat with a scrap of fish on the hooks or, on good mornings, before we’d undergone the obligatory round of impenetrable, pull-for-a-break tangles, we’d even have a feather or two to tempt fish.

You never see anyone using handlines in Britain anymore. Occasionally at the seaside, kids use them with a wodge of streaky Danish bacon tied in a bunch at one end, to tempt small shore crabs out of a crevice into a bucket.

We’ve got so rod-bound. So carbon-dependent. That we’re not happy unless there’s a good nine foot of high tech space age material stretching between our hands and our line.

Rods are generally so cheap now. Unless of course you suffer from occasional piscatorial pretensions, like me. So, there’s no excuse not to have one. Except, there are times and there are places when, it’s more fun to do without.

I first got a taste for born-again handlining in the Bahamas, fishing off a boat in 80 feet of water, straight down onto a coral reef below. Using slivers of squid for bait and small rocks as weights, I was instructed by a local fisherman how to hook reef fish and get them to the surface fast enough to stop the sharks or barracuda biting them off on the way up.

He took such great care to show me how to hold a loop of line between my thumb and forefinger. ‘Never, never loop it round your finger’ he said, with gravity. ‘If a shark gets a hold of your fish the tight line could slice through your finger like a cheese wire. Clean to the bone’.

It was a graphic enough description to make me wary and watchful for the rest of the few days that we fished together. And, ironically enough, he did hook a big tiger shark, more on purpose than by accident and showing off, nearly lost his finger in the process.

He chopped a huge U-shaped gouge out of the shank of his finger when the 100 monofilament lashed around it. He bled like a stuck pig. A chunk of bloody flesh popped out onto the deck. Even when he was looking down at the missing piece of his finger about to disappear down the scupper, he never so much as flinched with the pain. Christ these local fishermen are hard. If I’ve got a mild case of sunburn, I’m rubbing on layers of specialist creams and whining like a baby with cholic.

In Dubai one New Year, I booked a trip out on one the local charter boats with my two boys Rory and Rex. Being small, makes rod handing quite hard on board a boat. If the gunwale’s high and you stand less than three feet high to begin with, you’re at a distinct disadvantage. A handline in comparison, is lemon squeezy. Once the weight’s lobbed over all you have to do is hold on, lifting and dropping the line occasionally, to make sure the weight’s just on or just above, the bottom.

Lancashire born skipper, Chris Deane, was happy to have a crack at handlining for a few hours in the sun drenched middle eastern morning. Most of his clients are big game fishermen out hunting for the prolific sailfish population in the Arabian Gulf, but after a couple of days of fruitless trolling, due to a blip in the sailfish feeding pattern, a chance to try something different appealed.

Just a few miles off the beach from our hotel, we started to find clumps of white polystyrene floats bobbing in random join-the-dot patterns across the surface of the unfeasibly blue sea.

The floats marked the sites of local fishermen’s fish traps. Great galvanised box-structures weighed down with breeze blocks and baited with bread or fish scraps. The concentration of traps denotes some sort of fish attracting feature nestling on the sea bed.

‘It doesn’t take much to attract fish out here’ explains Chris ‘The landscape of the flat arid desert extends under the sea. Flat, even sand. Not a bump or a ripple. So anything, a few big rocks or an old wreck automatically draw the fish as a refuge’.

With his 13-year-old daughter Jodie helping my boys hurl and haul their lines, baited with postage stamp sized chunks of squid, the first bite came within minutes of anchoring up-tide of what he reckoned from the shape on the echo-sounder, must be a shipwreck. The first haul by Rory was a trevally of over four pounds. A great fish for a handline.

First you feel a bump, a tap, a knock and a rattle, then nothing. You have to make a guess at what point in this collection of sensations, to yank your hand skywards in an attempt to hit the hook home. The fish have good teeth and can strip a bait in seconds so you have to always internally negotiate when is just long enough to wait. They need time to get the bait properly into their mouths. But not too long, so the hook is cleaned to a gleaming sparkle and is spat back out, to dangle hopelessly in the water.

As handlining sessions go, our trip off Dubai couldn’t have been better. The slope from desert floor to sea bed is a gradual one, so even 10 miles out you’re only fishing in 70 or 80 foot of water. Not too much hauling, but plenty of bites. And for us, a haul of at least ten trevally up to seven or eight pounds. All returned alive, except one. Lunch.

Back at our hotel, Captain Chris persuaded the chef to grill the fillets of trevally and serve them with chips and salad.

There are anglers who couldn’t bear to travel so far to do something so basic. They’d need to be salt water fly fishing for bonito or trolling five different flashy baits for sailfish. For me, and my two dwarf sized co-anglers a tug on a bit of string works just as well. If not better.

And handline-caught trevally cooked with a crispy outer surface and a succulent white flaky middle, dipped in eastern spices and washed down with ice cold western lager, takes some beating. I couldn’t recommend it enough.