One of my favorite hobbies is fishing. Some people regard this as a boring or an old man’s sport, but I value it much more than that. If you have never experienced it, I think you are really missing something, and so you can’t truly give your honest opinion on the sport. Humans have been captivated with the sea, and catching fish since the beginning of their existence, and the sport has, in many ways evolved hugely, and yet in many aspects has stayed exactly the same. The sport is unique compared to others, and I find it can be anything from a relaxing, to a very intense experience, and every time is different.

        I was introduced to fishing by my father when I was only 4 years old, and I have been hooked on it ever since. It is one of the few sports that’s great for just socializing and friendships, as it breaks down the barriers we might have with one another. There are three main types of fishing; fly fishing, coarse fishing and sea fishing. I started with sea fishing off my uncle’s speedboat in The Solent around places like the Needles, but none of us really had any idea what we were doing, and to catch even one fish seemed like a huge success. The first fish I ever caught was, quite surprisingly, a small bass when I was fishing with some bait on a hook just floating off the boat. There is something about catching fish which just gives you such an adrenalin burst and it becomes an addictive experience which you just want to try again and again. The good thing about sea fishing, though, is that most of what you catch you can eat and I find it a lot more enjoyable compared to say coarse fishing where you are just catching the fish for no purpose. Every year since I can remember I have been going to Cornwall in the summer holidays, but when I was five or six, most of my cousins and I went on a deep sea fishing trip. This is one of my most memorable experiences because we were just hauling fish after fish into the boat when we hit a shoal of mackerel off a ship wreck. After almost filling a whole bin bag with fish, we called it a day, just as a pod of dolphin appeared. My auntie, who lives in Cornwall, was probably eating fish for weeks after we brought back that many.

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        Every year now, I go fishing down in Cornwall either in my uncle’s boat, or just off the shoreline. To my mind, each and every time I go fishing is unique just for the experience and no incident is ever forgotten. The range of things I have caught, in what I think of as not the most exotic of places, also quite surprises me; I have caught everything from dogfish to cuttlefish, conger eels to sea gulls – but that’s another story, and of course, every anglers worst nightmare, (apart from a hole in the boat and sinking), catching the ...

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