An amusing look at retirement

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When it became clear that I was to retire I decided I needed to look at hobbies. For ten years or more I had worked away all week and spent my weekends at home with Christine so this left very little time for hobbies and I realized that I had in fact no other interests outside work. So what to do?

Well I remember that one day over in Liverpool I was talking to Harry who tells me how he recently got into fishing. Sitting on the river bank all peace and quiet watching the water for signs of fish, reeling in with a large one on the line, it seems a lovely way to spend some ‘I’ time (keep up, planning session 10 explains ‘I’ Time).

Now, as you should know I am in The Bahamas at the moment so fishing here in this weather must be good and to boot my grandson Joe has all the gear, so I’m ready for some quality time. The baits on the line, the line’s cast, I’m sitting in the Jacuzzi with the rod at my side and the line goes tight, I reel it in, I’ve hooked a Barracuda in the swimming pool, I scream and sit up. I’m in bed and Christine is wondering what’s going on. How do I know I’ve just caught a Barracuda!! I go back to sleep.

So the day has arrived, the first fishing expedition and Joe wants to come with me, that’s OK because that doesn’t constitute a ‘we’ thing
- they are only with Christine. We pack the backpack, sodas, beers, sandwiches, coffee, dead fish for bait, spare hooks and whatever we think we may need. We pile it all in the jeep along with the rod and off we go suggesting Alex gets some BBQ coals to cook the fish when we return at tea time. We are quite excited.

We are at the harbour, legs dandling over the side, the sun is shining, the water is brilliant blue and we pour ourselves our first coffee of the morning. It’s all excellent. So we are ready, we need to put the bait on the hook so out comes the bag of dead fish and this is the point that Joe decides to tell me he doesn’t like touching fish. I put some dead fish on the line and because I have been practicing casting I get to cast the line as far out as possible. Joe then takes control of the rod and we sit back for the fish to bite. After ten minutes or so Joe reels in the line to find the bait gone but no fish so we do the whole thing again.

While we are sitting watching the line and I’m having my second coffee of the morning I ask Joe what we do when we catch a fish, how do we get it of the line, with a shrug of his shoulders Joe says ‘not my problem I don’t touch fish I told you before’ and carries on drinking his soda, so it seems it’s down to me.

We wait ten minutes or so again and Joe’s line goes tight, we’ve caught something. No it’s just snagged on rocks, we spend the next few minutes trying to release the line to no avail we have to cut it off and re-thread the rod and fix another hook etc. We then cast the line out again and wait… and wait ….. and wait.

Now we have a beautiful setting, everything about sitting here fishing must be as good at it gets but all can say is I must be missing something because fishing everywhere is a major activity with thousands of people doing it. Why? We sat for three hours, never had a tickle, drank the coffee and sodas and ate the sandwiches and called it a day. We both felt we had better things to do, Joe was ready to get in the swimming pool and thought I would do something exciting like watching the grass grow.

Maybe someone can tell me where I went wrong because I can’t see the fun in this. Alex even sent me down the supermarket to buy some fish for the BBQ because we had invited guests to share the spoils of our fishing expedition. Fishing is now off my list of new hobbies.

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