I had been waiting a long time… I had changed spots several times, stood on rocks and sat on rocks, cast from the left (for good luck) and cast from the right (when the left cast wasn’t good luck). The tide went out and the tide came in. According to my expectations, I used small pieces of bait, medium pieces and even whole squid (albeit tiny ones).

From time to time boats would pass under the bridge and each time the wake would dislodge my lead-weight and hook and send it under a rock so that I had to break the line and re-hook and find another weight. We soon ran out of little weights and the bigger they got, the more likely they were to snag each time a boat passed under the bridge – and they were pretty easy to snarl up in the first place.

The first bite, long awaited, was nevertheless a fairly unexciting event; it felt like a slow motion gulp. In fact it wasn’t a bite at all, just a wandering length of old rope (with a few marine growths on it) that decided to hitch a ride in order to see the light of day in the open air.

Thousands of jellyfish swam like an army on a mission, all going out to sea in their serried ranks, but often the ones closest to the sides of the bridge seemed to sense us and lingered awhile, perhaps in wonder at the strangeness of the people on the rocks.

At last the big (and only) bite came… It was real, a sure thing, a whopper – perhaps the biggest fish I had ever encountered at the end of my line. It might even have been a whale swimming underwater. Unfortunately I shall never know exactly what it was because he took my whole squid, a brand new shark hook and a 100 gramme weight, and he would not budge! I had to break the line again.

“I’ve had enough fishing for today,” said Bill.

My niece, Loretta, and I did not wheedle for an extra cast out – I was already thinking about the spa at home.