Hooked in the net gone fishing

Here's my scholart piece on fishing. I like the title in Finnish, because it is all in: in the net (verkossa), in the hook = hooked (koukussa), in fishing = gone fishing (kalassa).
The piece includes a collection of fishing photos as a youtube video from a period of five years, 2009 - 2014. As I say, fishing pictures are always clichés.

1.     I got my first rod when I was five. The rod was of bamboo, light, shiny and a pale yellow. The bobber was new, plumb and red and white. All the other rods were worn darker and soaked heavier. My grandfather’s rod was all grey.

2.     My first fish was a really big perch, and this is no fisherman’s tale, it became a story they used to tell in my family: beginner’s luck.

3.     I spent my summers in my grandfather’s boat. Or this is how I remember them. We had no summer cottage and we did not go to the countryside.

4.     I knew how to behave in a boat: you don’t shout and you don’t stand up when it’s moving. When you’re fishing you can stand. When you’re fishing you talk in an undertone fishingstuff: I’ll get that perky perch from there; it’s a roach, the way it’s bubbling; now it’s going, take it up!

5.     Women and children sat in the boat in the best place in front in cover. My place was on the half-deck: I lay on my stomach on the deck, held on to the cleat with one hand and my other hand in water. I was the one who jumped first on land with the rope. I was one of the fishermen.

6.     When I was fourteen I could drive the boat alone out of the harbor. My grandfather showed my aunt how to do that the last year he was alive.

7.     Fishing was my first experience of community born from shared skill and knowledge.

8.     Fishing is done together. You can share a fishing friendship with somebody you have nothing else in common with. And don’t need to make an effort to keep the community. Trying to clean up a net all messed up by a pike in -30 with the wind beating your fingers, or making a sudden turn at 3km/h speed without messing up the trolleys sure makes you share stuff.

9.     Fishing is done in something that is lightheartedly called “the nature”. Or a “landscape”. The fisherman feels it as the wind in her neck, the wind beating and the sun burning, the fog to get lost in and the blizzard to disappear in, the still summer water or transparent November mist. The fisherman does not go into the nature, but to Näsinselkä, Tikansalmi, Tuiskavanluoto, Mustakoski; she goes trolling round Big and Small Hornu and fishing on ice to Susijärvi. The fisherman has no separate point out of which to view the landscape, the fisherman is part of the landscape.

10. Fishing is not any supernatural union with an abstract “nature”. Fishing is craft and technology ancient and newest: how to slip the nets under the ice, reeling in the jig, casting the fly, the nodding of the ice-fishing rod, the ultrasound and the plotter.

11. Fishing pictures are always clichés.

12. The essential skill of the fisherman is the ability to do nothing.