Gone Fishin' - 1

I was always a fisherman. In her photograph album this picture, taken by my mother while we were still in Dar-es-Salaam, is captioned 'The Fisherman'. I suppose the urge to fish must be in the genes, and that I have those genes isn't surprising since my Haylett forebears were....

....fishermen on the Norfolk coast for generations as well as, in turn, being wreckers and....

....lifeboatmen, this picture being of the Caister lifeboat 'Beauchamp' in which several of the Haylett family were drowned in the 1901 disaster. Yet my father had no interest in fishing, his only enjoyment being in the fish themselves, for he loved herring, particularly in the form of kippers and Yarmouth bloaters.

I might have been a fisherman at heart but I don't recall having actually caught anything until 1952, when the family travelled to England on leave on board the 'Durban Castle'. In her autobiography, my mother wrote, "From Ascension, where Jonathan had a busy time fishing off the stern of the ship with a tin on a long string - and caught a fish which he insisted on keeping in their cabin overnight and about which the stewardess who brought our tea complained loudly next day - we sailed to the Canary Islands where we stopped for another day." I was seven at the time and vividly recall both the fish, which was small and black, and the gigantic shark which was spotted by excited passengers under the ship where I was fishing but which later turned out to be the propellor.

The first time I did any serious fishing was in 1958 when my mother, brother and I spent a summer holiday at 'Round About Friday', a cottage in Appledore, Kent. Richard and I made friends with some of the lads in the village and spent many happy hours catching roach, rudd and perch on the Royal Military Canal. Unfortunately, the largest things we caught were eels, which wrapped themselves in and destroyed great lengths of our precious lines.