FathomFishing

You are fishing in the dark, and the dark is where the good ones are. Drag down and the line goes out. Let go and it stops where you left it. A lure holding still is a lure that is fishing. The rest is nerve. A fish is worth four times as much off the bottom as it is off the surface, and the bottom is a long way down when the whole run is three minutes. Something is always crossing under you. Most of it ignores the lure. Getting one to look means being in its water when it comes through, and that is the only decision here worth making: where to sit, and when to give up on it and go somewhere else. When the line twitches, set the hook. A tap does it. So does a flick of the phone, if you would rather. Then it is you and the drag. Too loose and the fish takes line until the clock runs out. Too tight and the line parts, and you watch something good leave with your lure in its mouth. And it keeps the lure. You tie the jig back on and fish out the run with it. Another costs three coins, which is the cheapest lesson in drag settings anybody has been sold. They do not fight the same way. A bass makes one hard run and after that it is winding. A pike turns and swims straight at you until the line goes slack and the hook falls out. A grouper does not run at all. It goes home, and home is a hole in the rock with your line around it. You learn this the way anybody learns anything about fishing, which is by losing. There is a dock over a hundred metres of cold green-black water. A lake between two bluffs. A river the colour of tea, running too hard to leave a lure anywhere. And past all of it, blue water off a coral shelf with a marlin somewhere in the bottom of it. You reach each one by earning it. The guide keeps what you have landed and how deep it was, with a line about each fish that usually turns out to have been a warning. Nothing is for sale. No energy meter, no timer between runs, no currency with a price on it. Coins come out of the water and go on line and tackle. There are adverts if you want one, for a length of line or a lure a fish took or three more minutes, and watching one is never quicker than fishing. It runs with no signal, in one hand, in portrait, and there is a tap for every gesture.