It is a treasured feeling to be part of an environment in which you are completely comfortable; in control of very little, but utterly content at the whim of your surroundings. These rare moments are what I seek, and occasionally find, at the edge of a river or lake.

It is hard for bad news to invade the tranquility of a sunset spent behind the rods, or a glorious early dawn that draws you from your sleeping bag before the rest of the world has woken. With the most basic needs for food and shelter satisfied, almost nothing but good can come from time on the bank.

This complete envelopment into fishing is a fragile state. Too often, something will encroach and it all shatters. Even the very sight of another angler can be enough to break the spell.

I remember one long session on a new water which posed some difficult challenges. The water was very deep, and the enormous dam to my left opened and closed regularly creating serious undertow when the water was flowing. The fish were obviously there, but I just wasn’t catching them.

In spite of this, I felt completely absorbed in the session. Cramped in a tiny flat spot at the bottom of a steep, forested slope, my only contact with the outside world had been the frantic squeaking of a wobbly bike wheel as it made it’s way down the track above me.

When it stopped, I turned to see a small face poking though the bushes above me.

“Caught anything yet?” said the face.

“Not yet,” I replied. “But there’s still time.”

The boy retracted his head back through the vegetation and set off on his way. The high-pitched squeaking of the bike was now more of an apologetic sob as he struggled back up the long slope. I could still hear him a few minutes later, and he didn’t stop once.

As the session progressed I had my first success, and from there began to get a feel for how to approach the water. I could not have been happier. I was nestling in a remote and beautiful valley and without any prior knowledge I had begun to understand it. There was no pressure to catch, whatever would happen, would simply happen.

It was only on my final morning, as I contemplated switching the phone back on and driving back to reality that I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. In the thin sliver of clear water, through the snaking chicane of the lake and the steep banks to my right, I could make out something splashing into the water.

Plop. Plop. Plop.

Too regular to be anything natural, it must be something man made, I thought.

It was followed by a large arc of disturbance, and then another. Unmistakably, it was bait being thrown in. The boat must have been nestling just out of view behind a large headland about 800 metres away.

In a strange way I was crestfallen. All of a sudden I was not alone on this water and my understanding of it had changed somehow. I didn’t stay much longer after that, packing up and leaving without all the usual time-wasting countdown rituals.

I explored the lake more on my way home, perhaps trying to prove that it wasn’t another group of fisherman I had seen. But of course it had been, and there were a few more too spread out along a sandy roadside beach a couple of miles further up.

I didn’t mind those guys so much though, once I saw them. Whatever they had caught, they had always been out there in the open, never feeling at the mercy of the lake and the valley. Not tucked away in blissful ignorance like me.

Still, I wonder what they had caught…

Stumble it!