A very exciting hobby

I have loved fishing all my life. In my childhood I remember that my father taught me to fish with glass containers, the technique?  It's very easy… We take a glass container that is deep and not too wide. This means that the container should be sized so that the fish can get in but can't get out by turning around.

This technique works for small fish like sardines. You place small pieces of bread at the bottom of the container, add water to it so that the bread doesn't fall back but stays at the bottom. Then you place this container where the water is full of fish and fix it with some stones so that the current does not carry it away.

But this is a technique we used in the low flow river. It was really pleasurable to go to the river with my brothers and each of us would take our own glass container for fishing and on the way back we would take the result of our catch home. My mother would cook us fried fish that we each caught.

Eventually I liked having some aquarium fish and started buying goldfish and also giving fish as gifts to my friends on special celebratory occasions like as birthdays and anniversaries. So many liked my hobby and also adopted it for themselves.

For many years I kept the habit of keeping fish in aquariums. Even when I went to college I had my aquarium, the bad part was vacations because the fish didn’t get the care they should have and the water became cloudy, so some died and others remained.

Then I started to enjoy fishing with a rod. I invited some of my nephews to a pier where a couple of friends always invited me to fish.

They taught me how to fish with a rod and I stayed with that for a long time. It was very easy to fish with it. All I had to do was put the bait on the hook, set the hook and wait for the fish to start pulling on my rod. It was time to pick up my line and bring the fish to shore. It must be said that in many occasions the fish I managed to catch was a fish of bad esteem for being a producer of severe allergies. I took it with my hands several times with the risk that its spine would inflame my hands.

 I needed to put it back in the water. I had no choice but to pull it off the hook with my hands AND throw it back into the water. Of course, I was left with the allergy in my hands.

It started hurting, then it became inflamed and itchy, after a few hours the symptoms all went away and I kept fishing.

But most of the time the fishing was good. It has been more than 2 years since I have fished. The health and economic situation that engulfs the lives of the families we used to go fishing has prevented us from getting together again. But as the critical phase of this isolation ends I must return to the sea. It is very relaxing and also brings food home because the species we manage to catch are very tasty and well known in the environment.

My son accompanies me to the sea but he does not have the same taste for nature as I do. He likes to see my plants but he doesn't know the name of any of them. He likes the sea but from far away and he likes to see the fish in the aquarium and on TV.

All in all my memories of going fishing are very emotional. I remember that in my youth even at night I used to go fishing. On one occasion my father took all my brothers and me night fishing but it happened that it was so breezy that we lost our hooks and baits and we returned home very frustrated.

Another time several friends and I went to the dock to fish and after spending several hours casting we caught absolutely nothing. It's frustrating when we try to fish for fun and end up losing everything and even our spirits.

But I still love fishing from a pier or jetty. I have never gone fishing on a boat or yacht but I prefer to do it from land.

This activity is one of the things I love to do in life besides planting and caring for my plants, and of course writing my memoirs.