The Tiny River Alne - Submarines and Stomatology

As an accompaniment to this mood boosting Bin No.27 port the German cheese Montagnolo Affine is a surface-ripened, triple cream cheese with a soft, velvety natural rind. It is a almost a brie / stilton hybrid to try for those who may not be the biggest of strong blue cheese fans as it comes with a delicious saltiness that’s hard not to like. Voted the world’s best cheese 10 years ago take the plunge and see what all the fuss is about!. As someone who enjoys cheese and port from time to time, this is one of my favourite cheeses I must admit. 

Now Port Wine it is traditionally served and passed from right to left. This tradition is known as “passing the port,” and its origin attributed to officers in the English Navy. One of the explanations of this is that it was seen as sign of friendship and peace to the person sitting on your left. Now talking of Navy I did like this sorry on a documentary I heard a while back.

(late 1950's I think ) A small sailing boat with two fishermen aboard set out for a day in pursuit of mackerel just a mile or so off the coast. It was a bright sunny day, with a light swell and just enough wind to take their twelve-foot boat out to a mark they'd fished before with some success. But today the fish were simply not to be found. The fishermen tied on the bright feathers that normally prove so deadly with mackerel and fished hard for two hours. 

Not a single fish of any species took the bait. They moved a little further along the coast. Still nothing. They kept an eye out for flocks of gulls massing above the water - a sure sign that mackerel are about. Nothing.

 

The day wore on and, just as they were about to give up, one of the rods whipped over into a satisfying hoop. But this was no mackerel. The two fishermen were highly experienced and the man in touch with the fish quickly realised that whatever he had hooked was going to take a very long time to subdue.

Luckily he was using a massive old reel with nearly six hundred yards of strong line and a rod as thick as a man's finger. 

He was unlikely to be broken, they were in a very small boat and evening was coming on - what on earth were they to do? They hated the idea of deliberately breaking the line, but it would be dark soon and their lives would be in real danger if the weather turned. 

Time passed while they tried to make a decision and then the decision was made for them. The great orange disc of the sun vanished and the coastline was visible only as a series of faint twinkling lights. 

Two hours went by and still no sign of the fish. It kept up a dogged battle, staying close to the bottom and only now and then making a run for it. Each run was unusual, the two were later to say in that there was no sense of panic. The fish merely stepped up its pace and line would slip from the reel steadily at first but gradually increasing in speed. 

Once one of these runs had begun it could not be stopped. Eventually, exhausted by the constant loss and then regaining of line, the two fisherman began to pass the rod back and forth between them. That way at least they had time to recover from the intense arm ache that playing a heavy fish quickly induces. Another hour ticked past. By this time they were trying to follow the fish rather than trying to regain line after each run. When it made a move they sailed after it, but all the while keeping up a steady pressure.

At one stage, some three hours into the proceedings, both men began to think that they might be better off cutting their line simply because whatever was down there was probably too big for two men to handle in a small boat anyway. It was one of those rare occasions when the fisherman is actually slightly afraid of what he might find at the end of his line.

The little boat was moving through the water at quite a pace when the two men noticed that they had covered many miles from their original position. In short they had no idea where they were. As the night wore on the two men grew rather afraid. They were stuck in a small boat a mile out to sea in the dark and attached to a fish that was probably too big to get in the boat. By now they were very cold.

They tried everything they could think of to throw the fish off course or at least to get it to move in another direction or show some sign that hours of pressure were beginning to weaken it. Nothing made the slightest difference. The pattern of accelerating runs followed by a short pause continued. At last, and despite the fact that they had taken turns playing the fish, they had to give up. 

While one held the rod the other opened his pocket knife and cut the line. They sank into the well of the boat too worn out even to speak. The sea was running quickly now and it took a further two hours to reach land. Soon after pulling their boat up the beach they made an extraordinary discovery. The giant fish, combined with wind and tide had driven them more than fifty miles from home. 

Two years after their tussle with the giant, unbeatable fish one of the two men was glancing through a local newspaper when he came across a curious story. A small submarine had been detected by Royal Navy patrols a few miles off the coast. The crew had tried to identify the submarine and contact its crew but without success. 

The submarine was detected late in the evening moving along parallel with the coast, but twenty minutes after it had been detected, the submarine if that is what it was disappeared from the radar screen. The following night the Navy patrols detected a similar underwater vessel and again, having been tracked for some twenty minutes, it vanished.

A Navy spokesman told the newspaper reporter that they were baffled but would continue to investigate. The map that accompanied the story showed the probable route of the mystery submarine. It was further out from the coast than the two men had been that night but the course it had taken matched exactly that of the huge unstoppable fish. 

Had they been attached to a submarine all that time? It would certainly explain the long, fruitless battle with a fish that was bigger than anything that had ever been heard of in that region. 

The fish could have been that submarine or a giant shark that had strayed into British waters. But the mystery was never solved and the submarine was never again detected.

I'm wondering if the mystery fish that not only disturbed the surface of the river Alne on the last session but also took some bread off the top would ever be solved too. 

So I was back for another short session to try and winkle out some more chub but to also see if the mystery fish was still about. 

A chub couldn't have caused that amount of disturbance I wouldn't have thought so a carp is firmly on my suspect list. Same tackle same gear, the threat of rain again lets get fishing !!! Again I primed a few spots however this time I decided to spend a little longer in each swim. 

To cut a long story short if you'd managed to get through the first one what a different session this was wow, not only was it a one bite wonder where a primed swim came up tumps but I had a trout grab the bread on the retrieve and a chub that took bread off the top that decided that was the only piece it would like.

I should have brought the lure rod 😁 but that's fishing for you. No sign of the suspected carp either and I crept up to the waters edge having to fight my way through stingers and brambles. Oh well not a blank but the fish were either not there or just no interested. I decided to try the deep swim that always holds fish but nothing doing for 20 minutes and after I got caught up in a snag I decided to leave and come back with a bit more water on.