Slippery Fishing

I bought a salmon at the weekend and invited everyone who has been working with us lately to come along to our house and eat it.

Everyone was seated waiting for lunch to be served, Miss Whiplash and I were in the kitchen trying to wrestle the beast out of the poaching kettle and memories flooded back of another slippery salmon episode during a filming trip in Tasmania a few years ago.

We were renting a bungalow next to a beach, the holiday home of a scientist that we were working with. We had invited him to join us for supper so I lit the barbeque but as the landlord wasn’t due for an hour, I went for a stroll on the beach which was dotted with rock pools.

The tide was on its way out and I noticed something thrashing about in one of the pools, as I got closer I could see that it was a big salmon, trapped and exhausted. I tried to catch it but it was too slippery so I took off my flip flops and put them on my hands. I finally did manage to pick it up out of the water but it wriggled out of my grasp and fell on the rocks, effectively committing suicide. I gathered it up again and hugged it to me but it still managed to slither out of my arms a couple of times on the way back to the house, I got there just as our dinner guest pulled into the driveway and I presented him with my sand-coated trophy.

The landlord wasn’t as impressed as I expected, I knew him to be a keen fisherman but that evening he was on his way back from from a 'holiday’ in which he had spent an entire week camping by an artificial lake attempting to catch the fish that the lake owner had put in it – and caught nothing.