The Gifts of the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 266

slack and I was not going to give up yet. I crossed a small stream and
stepped down onto the beach. The fragile sunlight lay on the sand like
gold leaf. Over the water the haze of salt appeared to light up the sky.
The rocks glistened, black, against the bright sea. I would enjoy the
walk and search as far as I could before the tide shut the door.
I walked perhaps ten yards, then stopped. I had seen something
blue sticking an inch or two from the sand. I stared at it stupidly for
a moment. It looked like the top of my water bottle. I stared for a
moment longer, as the cogs slowly clunked together and began to
turn. It was the top of my water bottle. Around it, scarcely emerging
from the sand, was a black lip of some kind. The basal ganglia regis-
tered the sight, but it seemed to take an age before the message
bubbled up to the vaguely conscious sections of my brain. It was the
flap of my fishing bag, wrapped around the bottle.
The chances of finding the bag were tiny. The chances of finding it
within thirty seconds of stepping onto the beach were . . . 1 in 10,000?
100,000? 1 million? I dug round it like a dog and heaved it out. It was
rammed full of sand, but the clips were still closed. It must have weighed
half a hundredweight. I blinked at it, then I hauled it onto my back and
staggered away. Water poured from the bag and down my legs.
At home I filled a galvanized dustbin with water and emptied the
bag into it, then felt around in the sand - gingerly as I was mindful of
the hooks - with the thrill of a child plunging his hand into a lucky
dip. I began pulling out my belongings: first a reel, then a tangle of
lures and line from which my camera dangled, then the other reel,
then the smaller tackle. Everything was there.
The reels and the camera were seized up with sand. Over the next
few days I dissected all three. Mending the reels was not too difficult,
but the camera appeared to be dead. I shook half a handful of sand
out of it, dried off the parts then reassembled it. There was no spark
of life. I do not like throwing things away, so I left it on a shelf. Two
weeks later, without a thought in my head, I picked it up and pressed
the power switch. It flashed on then off again. I recharged the battery
and tried again, with the same result. After another week, it came on
for thirty seconds before shutting down again. Over the following
two months it slowly revived, regaining another function every time I
turned it on. By Christmas it was working perfectly.