In October 2010 I put down something I had been doing for years without having a name for it.

The forecast was for the big blow to arrive quickly on the south coast on Friday late morning or early afternoon corresponding to a rising spring tide approaching the top of its cycle. What this would do and depending on the arrival time of the system would be to generate ideal fishing conditions for bass. Coastal water would be clear and break white in the increasing wind strength; the sudden wave activity generated would provide cover to hunt and also create feeding opportunities that haven’t existed for a number of days. All this was happening over a single rising tide on a spring cycle. It was a perfect short bass fishing storm that was visible from as early as the 10th of October — 12 days previously; this was the stretching of the elastic. It snapped on Friday somewhere around midday of the 22nd.

I have read that back a lot of times over fifteen years and only lately noticed which part of it is doing the work.

Feeding opportunities that haven’t existed for a number of days.

Those days. Not the Friday.

---

The elastic stretches on a northerly.

That is the negative end of it. High pressure sitting down on the coast, the water gone clear and flat and lifeless, nothing breaking, nothing hunting, nothing to look at. It is the emptiest this coast ever looks. It is also the part everybody skips, in the telling and in the going.

It snaps on a southwesterly.

That is the positive end. The blow comes up from the southwest with a spring tide climbing underneath it, the water breaks white, cover arrives, and everything that has not eaten for a number of days now can.

The snap is the famous part. The snap is a photograph.

But there is nothing in the snap that was not put there by how long the other thing went on beforehand.

---

Twelve days, that October.

Twelve days of the wrong wind and the wrong water and going down anyway, which at the time I would have described as nothing happening. It was the only thing happening. The rest was just the release of it.

---

I have fished here for forty years believing the fishing was the snap.

It is not. The snap is a few hours long, it comes a handful of times in a season, and most of it you spend wet and not thinking. Everything on either side of it is the stretch — the flat clear morning, the washed-out sky, the same beach with nothing on it, and me on it too.

That is not waiting for the fishing.

That is the fishing, loading.

---

Which is the answer, I think, to a question I have been asked more times than any other, usually by someone who has just watched me stand in an empty sea for four hours.

Why do you keep going down when you know it’s no good.

Because it is not no good. Because a thing that is going to happen on a Friday starts on the tenth, and the only way to be there for the one is to have been there for the other, and because after long enough you stop being able to tell the two of them apart.

Mostly, the elastic is stretching.

That is not the wait. That is the coast, doing the only thing it does.