However long I have been here in Hive writing menial blogs with my typically weak prose, I have realized that, in all that time, I actually have not written much about my fishing experiences. I wouldn't have written this too had I not been ordered to write.:p More so than that is because whenever fishing comes up while chatting on our BDC discord server, I act like an all-knowing fishing guru. So this is my reckoning, and to make amends, I must write about my "first fish," the first one I ever netted, I suppose.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/692172849967923201/866037846934945823/IMG_20210713_182723.jpg

But, to be honest, it is not as easy to just write about the first fish I ever caught, the memory of which is as vague and dull as the eyes of a very old man who had spent half a century smoking weed for. That is because anyone can catch a fish. Watch some youtube videos, understand hook set, the angling motion to keep the perfect drag on the fish, a good fishing rod and reel setup, a spot that is statistically proven to have a high rate of successful hits, and viola, you are about 60% done. Now you can catch a fish. The rest comes from your reflexes that you inherited from your extremely efficient fishermen ancestors who fished for survival and made it a successful protein source through experience worth thousands and thousands of years. But in actuality, there is a subtle apparent difference between a fisherman and an angler. A fisherman catches fish for food, an angler does so for both food and sport.

The step up the ladder from a fisherman to an angler is so contrasting that once you choose this path, you can never go back. That single revealing moment is what one might label as the first fish. The moment, not the actual fish itself. As the experience is so surreal, only retrograde amnesia might make you forget. To put it as an expression, one can refer to it to get tattooed into someone's DNA. What I am saying might come out as dramatic and hyper philosophical, but you can ask any angler and get similar exuberant feedback.

I remember trying to fish puddles created from rainwater with tree branches, ropes for fishing lines, and pins of any sort as hooks. Just to mimic what I would see older people do. As I got older, I started with actual fishing hooks and eventually caught loads of fish. But never actually owned a complete fishing set, reels, rods, and all that. Those were elements of luxury that, for me, were not affordable back then. The first one I bought was not until 7-8 years back with my tutoring money. Back then, I had no knowledge about how intricate and complex fishing as a venture could be. All I knew was how to cast and how to make simple baits. As I acquired more experience and slowly stopped depending on luck, fishing became harder and harder. But I was committed. Even if I hadn't caught absolutely no fish on a trip, I would have no issues with venturing into the next one. On such a trip, I met one of the most passionate anglers I have ever seen.

We call him "Kobutor kaka," a nickname he earned because of his 100s of pairs of pigeons. At first glance, he looks like the brand ambassador of poor homelessness with his ragged, torn clothing, hair all messy, stains of dirt all over. He is an old,  extremely lean man with a grave impression of malnutrition all over him.  But all of your ideas about him would change once you see him bringing out his gear. The gears he owns might sum up to be thousands of dollars.

Almost all of the quite exclusive knowledge I have about fishing, I've learned from him. He used to tell me that the hardest to catch freshwater creature is a fish called "Dudh Bata'. And the rarest freshwater fish on this side of the Himalaya is called 'Golden Mahseer.' Dudh Bata is hard to catch because it has no cartilage in its lips where the hook usually gets set. So it's tough to catch one and even harder to land it.  And Mahseer is rare to catch, well, cause it's rare. Mahseer is an endangered species, and if it's ever caught, it mustn't turn into dinner. This is a mutually shared sentiment among the anglers I know.

The day I caught the Dudh Bata, I had stepped up to the next level, and almost a few years after that, when I had caught the only Mahseer I have ever netted, I knew I was addicted and could never turn back. To catch the Bata, you have to learn how to ferment a particular type of tree ant larvae and then weave it into the hook. Weaving the larvae into the hook is a tricky thing to do. And without a specific type of thin handmade "Daiichi" hook, you can't do it. The barb and the tip of the hook have to be tempered, so it doesn't break. That's how they make it very thin but still as strong.

It had taken me two days of continuous fishing to catch that one Dudh Bata. Previously my mates, who I usually fish with, had seen it float belly up in the mornings in one of our frequent spots. But none of them ever managed to catch it as these fish never eat the traditional bait we use. It lives off of planktons and only craves protein when it's the mating season which is in the monsoons. And even the most extreme and dedicated anglers don't go on trips in the monsoon.  Cause it's freaking hard to catch fish when it rains. But I did it. The luckiest thing was we weren't even fishing for carps. We were targeting an invasive type of catfish which usually scares away other fishes from our casting point. And that was our primary target. 17 rods baited with live cockroaches and 1 with ant larvae. In the afternoons of the second day and a tonne of catfish later, I had landed it after a 7-8 minute fight.

From the get-go, when I had set the hook, I could feel its drag to be not in common with what we were catching. A shaky run towards the deep with immense pull, a few seconds of pause, and then again, it would start its relay run. If I knew it was a bata, I would've done it much more slowly. With a 20 pound leader, I just pulled. And the guys I went with were also taunting me by saying I reel in like weak girls. So I yielded to their demands and reeled like a maniac. And when it was netted, all of us were baffled. Even with loads of our combined experience in the bag, none of us could recognize it. A carp-like fish, a forager with two whiskers, looked like an abomination. We wouldn't have known it was a Dudh bata if kobutor kaka had not been there. Native to Bangladesh and the plains surrounding the Ganges, and can be found nowhere else in the world.

At first, we were in a dubious doubt and thought kobutor kaka had turned senile. Usually, a full-grown Bata would be 13-15 cm long, but this one was almost 3 times that, and it was over two pounds. For a Bata to grow that much, it would take a decade or even longer. Because minnows like this one see a massive reduction in growth rate the older they get. And on top of that, these fishes have a few dozen natural predators. That's why they are both rare and hard to find. My theory on how it survived and grew this big was that the lake we were fishing in was devoid of any freshwater apex predators as it was secluded. But severe flooding a few years back had brought in those catfishes from a nearby massively polluted canal which is a breeding ground for those ugly marine creatures. But by then, our Bata had grown so big that it became a hard catch for the catfishes. Thus it had survived.

We had released it back in the lake a few minutes later. A precious creature as such turned into dinner would have been a grievous sin. Bragging rights were enough of a prize, and for me, that was plenty.