The Last Fisherman

🎣 The Last Fisherman

When Sam Pike was a boy, there were forty fishing boats in Sunbeam Bay harbour. The quay smelled of salt, diesel and fish, and the men shouted to each other across the water before the sun came up. Sam’s father had fished there, and his grandfather before that.
Now there was one boat: Sam’s. The Morning Star was blue and white and fifty years old, and so, Sam liked to say, was he — although he was seventy-four. The fish market had become a seafood restaurant with a neon sign. The net store was a shop that sold scented candles. And every summer morning, when Sam came back with his small catch of mackerel, there were tourists on the quay, pointing their phones at him as if he were a seal.
He grumbled about them to his sister Joan, who ran the Harbour Café. “They photograph me, but they don’t buy my fish. They eat prawns from the other side of the world in that restaurant and call it local.”
“Then sell to them,” said Joan. “Or talk to them, at least.”
“I’m a fisherman,” said Sam stubbornly, “not a tourist attraction.”
One morning in July, a girl of about twelve was waiting at the end of the quay. She had been there, it turned out, since five o’clock. She did not take a photo. Instead, she asked him how he knew where the fish were.
Sam was so surprised that he answered. He told her about the birds that dived where the mackerel were feeding, and how the water changed colour over the sandbanks. She asked how old the boat was, and what the strange knots on the ropes were called. By the time he had finished, an hour had passed and his tea had gone cold.
She came back the next day, and the next. Her name was Ellie, and her family had rented a holiday cottage for three weeks. On the last day, her mother came down to the quay. “She has talked about nothing else,” she said. “Would you ever take people out with you? We’d pay, of course.”
Sam looked at the girl, and at the water, and reluctantly said he would think about it.
The next summer, a small handwritten sign appeared next to the Morning Star: FISH WITH SAM — two hours, four people, learn the old way. Sam showed his passengers how to read the birds and tie the knots. He told them stories about storms and his father. They took photos, of course. But now they also took home the fish they had caught, and they bought more at Joan’s café, where Sam now sold his catch every morning.
He was still the last fisherman in Sunbeam Bay. But he felt a quiet pride he had not felt in years. And every July, a girl called Ellie came back, a little taller each time, and tied the knots faster than he could.