Well, that’s something new,” declared a voice from above. Looking up, I saw an elderly gentleman standing on the edge of the harbour wall. “I have never seen anyone pole fishing in the sea before.” I smiled and we chatted for a few minutes but, as we did, I mulled over his opening words. While his second statement was undoubtedly accurate, his first was very far from the truth.
My own adventures with a pole had started over 30 years previously, but this was merely a drop in the ocean compared to the five and a half thousand years that people have been pole fishing in the sea. Stone inscriptions on Egyptian walls showed people fishing with primitive poles around 3,500 BC, while Greek and Roman mosaics from 2,000 BC showed the exact same thing. Still later, the Greek poet Oppian of Corycus, who between AD 177 and AD 180 wrote the Halieutika, a series
