One Foggy Night
When I lived at Tynemouth, 5 or 6 of us used to fish King Edwards Bay on a very regular basis and one night we had arranged to meet down on the beach. Three of us got there first and stood around for a few minutes and just decided to carry on.
Now it was one of those nights that there was a very thick fog, no wind and not a sound to be heard.
When we got to the water’s edge – which was low water by the way – we realised that there was a big sand bank in front of us with a gulley filled with water only about a foot deep – so we decided to cross out on to it. We tackled up, cast out and just stood there lost in our thoughts, not making a sound. About 20 minutes or so later, we heard the rest of the lads coming down the beach towards us. After a while we realised that they had stopped on the beach and hadn’t noticed the fact that there was a sand bank in front of them.
The next thing we knew, leads were dropping on the sand beside us. For some reason the three of us all thought the same thing at the same time and, without saying a word, we picked up the lines that had been cast next to us and gave them some almighty tugs. This resulted in yells from the beach “What a fish” and so on. What we then did was to keep tugging at the lines for two or three minutes and the three of us got close together and very slowly allowed the lads on the beach to wind us in.
As we loomed up out of the fog, there were screams of terror – rods and reels were thrown away and the last we saw of them, they were disappearing up the beach at a hell of a rate of knots. When they discovered it was us, they threatened to beat us to jellies, but after a while they did see the funny side of it.
Even now, when I think about it, I still laugh.
