Extreme Fishing (35 page)

I tell her, ‘Stay here, it’s going to take a real man to catch a fish today . . . [pause] . . . and here he is, Sergei Lukiv.’

Sergei crumbles in front of the lens, staring at Craig as if he is pointing a Kalashnikov. We try to warm him up but he is not one for small talk. Sergei would also rather stand by the fire and
watch me fish than have a conversation.

The river is freezing and I need to wade in to get a decent cast. Almost immediately I can’t feel my toes. In order to cast I use bare hands, which I need to warm up every few minutes.
I’m using Tatiana’s old tights filled with salmon eggs as bait, which I trot along the river and let the current take downstream. It’s an unusual method and an unusual use of
tights. I like to keep my wife’s hosiery to buff up my brogues or polish the car. It comes up lovely.

The cold is perishing, my fingers are painful and the whole experience is far from enjoyable. Everyone is by the fire, including the crew. Craig is using a long lens and Peter has good signal
– they are nice and toasty. There are no fish in this bloody river. Off in the distance to my right is a half-formed oxbow lake. Water is still flowing in and there are fish in there. We go
and inspect. I can see dozens of char, but it’s difficult to cast into and impossible to wade.

Luckily Sergei has a plan. I dangle my line into the lake while he runs upriver to scare the fish towards my balls of eggs. Slightly surprisingly he starts throwing snowballs at the fish,
pounding lumps of snow into the water. Splosh! Sure enough the fish head in my direction, but the last thing anyone being pelted with snowballs wants to do is
eat
. When I smacked Prada on
the bonce with one on the hill up to the Nanai, he didn’t react by saying, ‘Do you know what, I really fancy a steak sandwich now.’ God help us! However, we are so up a frozen
Shit Creek that all ideas, however bonkers, are being considered. Suddenly I feel a faint nibble on my line. I reel in a small parr (baby salmon) about three inches long. Sergei smiles; he’s
delighted for me.

‘Wow, I feel so butch now.’

I pop it back in the water quickly and feel seriously depressed. This is getting ridiculous but then if the producers had wanted to make it easy they would have sent us here in the summer. That
bastard Hamish Barbour has a lot to answer for.

Desperate times mean desperate measures but it turns out that Tatiana has an amazing plan. She announces she knows an old Itelman method, used for centuries to feed the tribe over difficult
winter months. She makes two little fish lures out of reeds. I look at them.

‘Are they meant to be fish-shaped?’

‘Yes,’ she smiles.

I smile back. They are truly rubbish. I am utterly sceptical but willing to give anything a go. She wades into the river and, on very short lines, she bends over and drags them backwards through
about six inches of water. As she ‘trawls’ the lures she says, ‘Here, fishy-fishy. Here, fishy-fishy.’

I’ve seen it all now, but she is determined this method is going to work. But it doesn’t take an Oxford don to work out – it does not. I tell her if she catches a fish I will
eat my own head. Only the most academically challenged salmon would go for this method. I can’t stop laughing and she is genuinely offended.

‘Here you fish for subsistence, not just for fun,’ she explains.

‘Well, the philosophy of what we do, you know, on this journey is that we eat what we catch, which I think will be pretty difficult today. But I tell you what, I’m really glad
you’re here. Do you know why? Because you brought a bit of glamour to the show. You smile, you’re a lovely person, and you’ve cheered me up,’ I say, gushing.

She blushes. ‘You’re very enthusiastic, too.’

‘Very enthusiastic and handsome, right?’

‘Of course,’ she giggles coyly.

‘Thank you, Tatiana.’

And that’s how we end the sequence – me lamely fishing for compliments. It’s the best we can do.

Having caught nothing, we return to Tatiana’s village, where her mother and family are sitting down ready to eat the Uuka soup, without the Arctic char. They are not
happy about it and neither am I. I feel like a failure. Imagine all those years ago, that sinking feeling of the hunter-gather returning from days of hunting, the expectant look on his wife and
children’s faces.

‘What you got, Dad?’

‘Nowt.’

I’d have gone AWOL for days rather than face that.

‘Could you apologise to the chefs that I haven’t brought any arctic char?’ I ask Tatiana.

‘Of course,’ she says.

An exchange starts in Russian. The mother says, sarcastically, ‘How did our butch friend get on?’

Tatiana says, ‘Our butch friend took the piss out of our straw lures and caught bog-all.’ (to paraphrase)

‘Stupid Geordie pillock!’ says Mum, or words to that effect. I don’t care – it’s the butch comment that cut deep. I’m not
that
scrawny.

The Uuka soup is delightful and really tasty. We eat in their wooden log cabin, which is basic but rather like a Swiss chalet. The family is very close and unified. In order to survive out here
you all need to work together and be made of stern stuff. It strikes me as quite a matriarchal society. I have always said there would be no more war if women were in charge; just twenty-eight days
of serious negotiations.

That night I am staying with the family in the Village of the Damned. The house is a kind of granny flat with a definite granny smell, depressing pictures of Tsars and
religious icons all over the walls and some very worn and basic furniture. I am staying here without the rest of the team, who are all in different houses. I’ve lucked out with a
vodka-juggling trio. I think the old fella’s Sergei’s grandfather but I can’t be sure. He offers me vodka but I politely decline. He takes umbrage. The younger man passes me a
plate of cubed horsemeat –
he obviously shops at Tesco
, I think. I politely decline again. He too takes umbrage. He clunks the plate down on a side table and we sit in silence, in the
dark, with only the glow and crackle of the fire to warm the atmosphere. The old lady in the corner gurgles and dribbles in her chair. I think she’s had a stroke, poor dear. The old man
kindly wipes away her drool with his hand and takes another cube of horsemeat,
with the same hand
! He offers me the plate again. I smile, swallowing a gag reflex and, once again, politely
refuse. I wasn’t keen on the horsemeat to start with but now I’m defiant. I am already sitting on my bed, a worn leather settee with a crocheted blanket and a cushion as a pillow, by
the fire. The family soon melts away into the dark and I am left to a fitful night’s sleep. The young man wakes to stoke the fire throughout the night – three o’clock, four
o’clock, five o’clock, he puts logs on to keep it burning. Obviously word has got round that Butch would probably freeze to death without the fire. I thank him for his kindness.

Dolinovka

‘To misquote a US president: “We don’t do this extreme fishing because it is easy – we do it because it is hard.” And one of the most
insidious crimes an angler commits is when his ambition falters and he accepts his fishing limitations. I will triumph over adversity. I will catch a fish and put an end to this fishing
debacle.’

‘Hoorah!’ Sergei and my band of brothers cheer, and we get in the truck and travel 300 miles north to Dolinovka. Matt said it was only four hours away – more like nine in our
piece-of-shit army truck.

Oh my God, it has to be the most uncomfortable journey of my life and a bit like travelling in a freezer, only a freezer would have been warmer as it’s only –18 degrees. The
condensation on the windows has turned to ice. I am shivering and I am wearing an Arctic coat and trousers, two layers of thermals and another five layers under the coat. But the views are
astonishing. The vast wilderness of Siberia is like nothing I have seen before. It is the most untouched, unspoiled and unpopulated place on the planet. We stop and take pictures at every turn. And
in the villages there are massive murals of Yuri Gagarin on the sides of buildings, as well as other national heroes of the space race. Time, too, is on ice here.

We jump out of our
Apocalypse Now
truck at a place on the Kamchatka River, near Dolinovka. It’s frozen over, and the ice is about four feet thick in places. Matt decides to have an
ice-fishing competition to catch steelhead, Arctic char or grayling.

It’s me versus Sergei, who is wearing some curious-looking camo ski gear that looks like it is from World War II – and it probably is. We have four hours and the winner is the one
who catches the greatest number of fish. Sergei has already beaten me at poker on the bus, and we are pretending that I need to win back my watch. But this is a serious competition, not a TV setup,
and we are both VERY competitive. He is the Russian Bear, I am the British Lion and this is our very own Cold War. He stares at me with a steely gaze but I am strangely confident. I have learnt
enough to ice-fish alone from Victor, the old man at the Amur River who taught me how to present the lure to the fish, how to dig a hole with a spear and what size, and from Alexei and Andrei, who
taught me to shut up.

I keep my distance from Sergei, who is making a racket using his drill. I dig my hole with a spear made from a branch with a knife tied to the end of it. I have gone for thinner ice, and I feel
there might be a feeding channel below. It’s just a hunch but I’m going with it. I don’t say a word, I just slowly bring up the bait, just as the dhow fisherman taught me in Kenya
and Howard showed me when fishing for pike in Alaska.

After five minutes I get my first bite and I pull up a one-and-a-half-pound stone char. It’s a pure char, indigenous to the area. The signature of char compared to a trout is they have a
light background and dark spots, whereas trout have a dark background with light spots. Char also have brilliant white leading edges on their pectoral, pelvic and anal fins. The char is part of the
salmonid family and it is its adipose fin that distinguishes it as game fish. No one’s totally sure what this mysterious fatty fin is for but it is thought to help with swimming function.
This turns out to be the first of many, and very quickly it’s 7–0 to me.

I say, ‘It’s like Man-U playing Accrington Stanley. It’s a battering, Sergei.’

Sergei has a fit.

‘Why are you doing this to me? Why are you making fun of me? I don’t understand. I have done everything you have asked.’

With ten minutes to spare, Sergei catches a grayling. I have never seen one before and am genuinely excited – it’s an extraordinary fish with a dorsal fin like an angel’s wing.
Sergei is a good fisherman and has helped us a lot – I hug him and concede that he has caught the best fish of the day. I recite an anonymous quotation: ‘She is sometimes called the
silver lady of the stream and in the pure water, essential for her existence, she is as graceful and as clever as any of her rivals.’

As we enjoy the tender, delicate meat of the grayling and Arctic char by a makeshift fire, Matt turns to me and says, ‘There is something in this competition lark.’

I agree. It’s like the missing element of the show – the Higgs boson. Men behave in an entertaining way when they compete – the rivalry, history, preparation, winning and
failing, and the struggle. As it turns out, when Hamish sees the cut he agrees, and picks up the phone to Channel 5 to pitch the new idea. They commission a fifth series almost immediately.

In spite of all the trials and tribulations of this final journey, the
Extreme Fishing
show is really beginning to work, and what a privilege it has been to work
alongside and meet some of the most talented and amazing people on the planet. My dad always said, ‘There are lots of wonderful folk in the world and you have to meet as many of them as you
can.’ I’ve done that against the backdrop of truly astonishing locations and connected with people of all nations through the universal passion for fishing. Except with Andrei and
Alexei here in Russia – they were difficult nuts to crack – but everywhere else I’ve experienced nothing but kindness and enthusiasm, like from my old friend Sergei here. Long may
the show continue.

And now it’s time to drink vodka! Sergei and I clink glasses and the firewater blows my head off again.

Fade to black.

Thank you to Team Extreme (you know who you are) for allowing me to not look like a jerk at one end of the line waiting for a jerk at the other. Special thanks to Directors
Jamie Goold and Alistair Smith who ‘got it’, along with the irrepressible Sound Supremo Peter Prada . . . thank you for staying with me guys . . . millions wouldn’t! I can’t
leave out Hamish Barbour, Helen Nightingale and Gerry Costello, not only for giving me the dream gig but for throwing me a life line every time I was drowning in front of the lens, which was quite
often. Sandra Jobling and her Husband Ken for being there when it mattered most, especially the phone call which went along the lines of ‘Get me off this F****** Island!’ The unending
support of my mother Anne, two sisters Dawn and Joanna, along with my kid brother David. My Uncle Matheson for teaching me everything I know about fishing (yes it was his fault everyone). Briony
Gowlett and the gang at Simon & Schuster, and my co-author Charlotte Reather for turning my notes, diaries and this extraordinary, extreme and sometimes absurd adventure into a beautiful and
entertaining story. I miss our daily six-hour Skype calls. Thank you to Vanya for being a wonderful mother to our beautiful son Taylor. If I have forgotten anyone it’s because I’m
heading towards fifty and even though the wheel is still turning in my memory the hamster is well and truly dead.

Charlotte would like to thank High Tower for his unwavering support, love and belief, Mom and Pops for being there throughout my rakish journey for backing, supporting me and
loving me without limits (even when the rozzers were involved). Maurice Gran for being the best confidante and chief cheerleader a girl could have, and Robson for his belief, integrity and
friendship. You are amazing people and so are all my wonderful friends who have always known I am a star in waiting. Is this Kate Winslet enough?