Extreme Fishing (13 page)

We walk into the psychic salon and meet Tammy the psychic. I shake hands with the buxom blonde, who is a cross between Doris Day and Kirstie Alley at the height of her drink and junkfood
problem. She looks into my eyes, still holding my hand, and no word of a lie says, ‘How’s your father?’ I gasp. Now, on reflection of her subsequent bonkers behaviour, I’ve
taken this to possibly be less a comment about Dad’s heart attack and more a how’s-yer-father, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, fancy-a-bit scenario. Either way, this whole psychic thing is
playing tricks on my mind. We sit down at a table and Tammy reads my palms, her tarot cards and my mind. She looks into my eyes seductively.

‘Robson, I honestly believe, on this journey, you are in a location where you are destined to be, but you’re not in the right spot. There is a spot and you will find what you are
searching for. You’re going to become a winner – you always have been, and you always will be. You’re a lover, not a fighter. You will succeed in what you’re looking
for.’

I only hear the words ‘winner’ and ‘lover’.

Robson: ‘Tammy, can I ask you a question?’

Tammy: ‘Sure, sugar.’

Robson: ‘Will you be my agent? No one has ever said those things to me. And if not my agent, will you marry me?’

Quick as a flash she gives me her ring.

Tammy: ‘Yes, here’s a ring. Just put it on me.’

I suddenly realise I’m in unchartered and dangerous waters here. She wants my number . . . so I give her Jonathan’s. Thinking it’s mine, she clutches it to her enormous bosoms.
What on earth have I done?
You haven’t bloody thought it through again, that’s what
, cranks up my inner monologue.
You have just asked a lonely woman of a certain age to marry
you and she doesn’t see it as a joke; she thinks you are her white knight finally come to free her from the shackles of perpetual loneliness and suffering, like Prometheus bound to the
mountain every day, an eagle pecking at her liver. And then you ride into town and offer her a glimpse of hope to break the bonds and stop the pain. You bloody fool, you’ve really gone and
done it now
.

Tammy ends her reading by saying: ‘You are not catching fish because the fish have moved. You need to follow the fish.’

Jamie: ‘That’s brilliant – she’s a genius.’

‘
I
could have told you that!’

But Jamie is already out the door shouting, ‘Follow the fish!’

Back at the hotel it’s all hands on deck as we plot where the fish have gone and how we’re going to locate them. Mike and his gang think they have moved to
Manhattan, and that’s exactly where Jamie wants to go. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea but he wants to shoot the unfolding story of us trying to track down these elusive
stripers. Jamie calls Hamish in Glasgow, who thinks it’s a brilliant idea, so it’s settled: we’re going to New York.

‘Are we going to fly there?’ I ask.

Jamie: ‘No. We are going by van.’

Robson: ‘What? But it’s miles!’

Jamie: ‘No, it’s less than an inch on the map.’

Robson: ‘Jamie, this is America!’

I am reminded that there is no money left in the budget because of me. I shut up.

Jonathan’s phone rings. He answers. It’s Tammy-the-psychic trying to get hold of me! I signal that I am not here, shaking my head vigorously. He tells her I’m unavailable. She
calls back a few more times but by late afternoon the calls have stopped, and we think she has got the message that I don’t really want to marry her.

Later that evening we wander down to the hotel bar to get a few drinks and something to eat. Standing in the lobby is Tammy. Before she sees me, I turn and leg it up the stairs, leaving Jonathan
to deal with her, again. She tells him she really needs to talk to me. Jonathan tells her I’m not here. She says that’s not true because she’s been waiting out in her car and she
knows I haven’t left the building. She’s been staking me out! Jonathan finally persuades her to go and we hit the bar. It has slightly freaked me out but then I think, if she’d
been any good at clairvoyance, she should always have been ahead of me. Now that would be scary.

The next day we embark on a nine-hour road trip to New York in a van. I’m dreading it but it actually turns out to be one of the nicest journeys I have had. We really
bond as a team, stopping to eat burgers and nachos and all kinds of other really bad junk food, and singing songs. We are all squished in – well, they are. I am at the front, of course.
It’s the
Extreme
boy band on tour.

The next morning, our new striped bass expert finds us in the restaurant of the hotel having breakfast.

‘They’re here,’ says Tooch in a sharp Bronx accent.

He looks like a character out of
The Sopranos
. We head over with him to Sandy Hook Bay and meet his friend Brian. It’s very early but these guys are wide awake and bang up for
action. As we head out across the sparkling water on a small speedboat, the hazy silhouette of New York’s skyline unfolds in front of us like a giant poster . . . Wow. It’s awesome to
be here, especially as Brian tells me we are definitely going to catch striped bass today. Brian receives a text from another local fisherman: the bite is on and we’re heading at
full-throttle to the spot. We have found the fishing G-Spot, as foretold by the Boston stalker, and I’m excited about going in for a tackle against the Alan Shearer of the ocean.

The birds are feeding and the bass are here in their thousands. Unlike trying to catch the bass on the fly, as I did with Mike (even though they were here all the bleeding time), today
we’re not taking any chances. We are sinking lines and using toby lures to try to tempt the fish. Brian says that if we want to eat tonight this is the most practical method –
there’s no time for purist sentiment on this boat, I want me a striped bass! If dynamite were another option I’d have gone for that as well.

Ten minutes later Tooch has a striper on the end of his line. The camera crew and I are ecstatic. Brian and Tooch are taken aback by our reaction. Tooch’s fish has to go back, as the legal
size is twenty-eight inches, but it’s a stunner, a piscatorial zebra.

At last I get a bass on the end of my line as well. It fights like a rainbow trout, as it’s strong, fast and likes to run. It’s crucial I keep my line tight and don’t put too
much drag on it or the fish will come off. After a couple of runs, including one under the boat, the fish tires and I reel him in. He shoots! He scores! He lands a bass! Sadly it’s too small
to keep so I have to release it, but what a stunner. It’s like a skipjack tuna but stretched. Under the water they appear dark green but in the light you can see the black and white curved
stripes. I pop it back. I don’t mind; I’m one very happy fisherman.

With the Empire State Building in the background, it’s a fantastic end to a fantastic trip. Don’t go to New York for the shopping – go for the fishing.

A week later, back in the UK, Dad is as right as rain. I visit him at his huge eight-berth caravan near Bamborough Castle, where he lives with his girlfriend of seven years,
Yvonne. He loves the outdoors and would have had us all growing up in a caravan if he’d had his way.

‘Are you taking it easy, Dad?’

‘Yes, Robo. I’m drinking less, which is a bloody shame but I did have a swift pint at the Black Bull last night with Plum. First time out since the attack, mind. Plum says to me:
“Big Rob, your lad’s never off the TV.” I said: “I know, we call it interference.”’

February 2009, Series 2

Hamish Barbour and I are enjoying a good lunch at the Two Fat Ladies in Glasgow, talking about the possibilities of Series 2. We gulp more wine and come up with a few
ideas, Hamish as excitable as ever. I regard him across the table – he looks like a Swan Vestas match, with his tight red hair and pale lean body from all those triathlons he does at the
weekends. The comparison suits his personality, too. He ignites all the programme ideas by slowly getting the wet logs (the TV suits) to light up about something, anything. It’s an unenviable
task and he almost burns himself out trying to get them to finally spark. I suppose Hamish is a creative firestarter; if he had crazier hair and Keith from The Prodigy had an eating disorder, they
could be twins.

‘What about
Robson Crusoe
?’ says Hamish, combusting, ‘You are cast away for twenty-four hours and have to survive on your own, using all the skills you’ve learnt
to feed yourself from the ocean?’

‘Fantastic! But maybe I should do it for seventy-two hours because I have learnt a lot, Hamish. I think I really would be fine for that amount of time. A bit loopy, granted, but fine.
I’ve been watching a lot of Ray Mears, which should come in handy.’

‘Great. Great. Twenty-four hours will be fine, Robson. I’ll get Helen Nightingale [the series producer] to set it up. [To the waiter] Can we have the bill, please?’

The NeverEnding Journey

The
Extreme
team and I are travelling 7,000 miles to the 7,107-island archipelago of the Philippines, on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a
three-day journey and Jamie Goold wants to film the first few minutes of the show on my diary cam. He says I’m not to shave because I need to film the intensity of the journey and its effect
on me. Well, thanks, Jamie. It’s the first time I’ve thought ‘Fuck me, I’m middle-aged’ and it’s depressing. I’m entering the autumn of my years but today
it looks like bleak midwinter. Jamie, Craig Herd (a Kiwi cameraman), and Peter Prada, the soundman who from this point on becomes part of the
Extreme Fishing
furniture, are with me on this
odyssey. We travel via three different planes, each getting progressively smaller, until the smallest finally takes us to Manila. It’s a terrifying flight and I’m glad it’s
over.

As we drive through the capital in a brightly painted minibus I realise that we couldn’t be any more conspicuous. The city is a chaotic mixture of traffic, noise and humidity. Thousands of
tuk-tuks, all beeping, zoom down the streets, there are minibuses crammed full of people, high-rise flats line either side of the road, and there is a hot, damp smell of fuel, drains and people.
Every time we stop in traffic, the locals stare at us. It’s a place where you need to look like you know where you are going, because if you don’t, urban predators will smell your fear.
This is a Third World country with Third World problems, including great poverty, corruption and violent crime, and because of that we have a team of security guys to look after us and they are
tooled up to the max. I later find out that the kidnapping of Westerners for ransom is fairly common.

As we approach the edge of the city, Jamie reveals that he wants to film the rest of the journey with me travelling in a tuk-tuk behind the van. So while the rest of the crew are sitting in
relative luxury, I am forced to endure a three-hour noisy and very bumpy journey to the coast southeast of Manila. It’s like taking a motorised chair from Newcastle to Liverpool. When we
finally arrive, my bottom is numb and I’m feeling cranky but it’s straight onto a boat for another three hours, heading to our final destination: the teardrop island of Siargao in
Surigao del Norte province in the Philippines Sea.

It’s an open-topped boat and we’ve barely left port when it starts to pee it down. We are not prepared – no one is. Even though we are filming a TV show, the fixer has
overlooked the fact that we would have all of our camera equipment with us. In order to save the thousands of pounds’ worth of recording equipment, we are forced to surrender our waterproofs
and get soaked through. It’s like a hairy wet T-shirt competition on board. I feel sick. Apparently it rains a lot here.
Maybe staying on a desert island for twenty-four hours is not such
a good idea
, I think.
Rubbish, it’ll be fine, you big Jessie
, replies the other voice within.

Siargao is a tropical paradise, white sand and a clear blue sea, as well as dense mangrove forest and wetlands that help protect costal areas from erosion and storm surge. We are staying at one of the Philip pines’ best-kept secrets, the Pansukian Tropical Resort. This
place is so amazing and opulent that even the president stays here. I’m staying in his room, aptly named the Presidential Suite, where there’s enough space to swing a cat, a dog and a
bleeding horse, and all the crew’s ‘quarters’ are the same: absolutely massive. It’s been well worth the ball-breaking effort to get here. I clean my teeth and look in the
mirror. I am dishevelled and look so much like my dad, who has thankfully now made a full recovery and is back up to flying speed.
Why do we have to perish and decay?
I wonder. Still, at
least with age some other things have improved, like my monobrow now being consigned to the past. I didn’t even know I had one until I started dating Vanya. Pretty much after our first date
she attacked me with tweezers. I used to look like Frida Khalo and didn’t even know it.