Jonah glanced into his bucket. A bucket of white wrinklers, glistening, coiling in the greasy cool. "Oh! How crazy will the fish go for these beauties!" he thought. Every fisherman had his secrets, and the white wrinkler was Jonah's new weapon. These were no pretentious, minuscule, five-star appetizers, nor were they some greasy, overpriced fast food main course. No. These were succulent desserts; the fish equivalent to Mississippi mud pie, or a banana split smothered in a chocolate and butterscotch sauce. The kind of bait which appealed to a young, active, well-bred carp or bream. Carpe Pesca! (seize the fish!), that was Jonah's philosophy. He shouldered his bag of floats and weights, grabbed his rod in one hand and his bait bucket in the other, and set off.

He often walked to his spot by the river at the same time every morning. He encountered the same people. Mr. and Mrs. Pike, having picked up their Sunday papers, were heading towards the pub, for a stretch and a coffee, to read over the sport and social columns ( Mrs. Pike was a demon for the football )
The minnow girls and a school of sisters, cousins, and nieces terrorized the local boys. A band of young Amazon's exercising a Y chromosome mob mentality with such efficiency, that it made Jonah shudder and bless the day he had left behind childhood, among a no man's land of broken toys and tattle tail and crushed ego's.

"Hi Jonah, going to finally catch a whale, are yea?". A chattering cricket cacophony of laughter erupts. The few that are old enough to know what they are laughing about, do so with such confidence that the younger ones join in, amplifying the swarm's buzz.

"Maybe, just maybe," is the soft reply Jonah discards to the horde, like a lizard losing his tail to live again, he shreds his dignity and moves on from the noisy mob.

It was true that Jonah had yet to catch a fish, and he never did as others did, he didn't inflate his memories, that is to say, he never spoke about "the one that got away. It was this big! and shimmied on the line like a jackhammer!"

No. That wasn't Jonas's way. Fishing as he perceived it, was not about catching the fish only. No, the action was the reward itself not the goal of the action. Of course, the fact that the action of fishing involved a large amount of inaction, was evidence enough to Jonah, that fishing was the only true zen art form.

Ms. Salmon passed him on the winding track to the river. Braking and accelerating around him on her mountain bike like a wild fake blond school teacher Valkyrie. Jonah was gentleman enough not to ogle the lady that had all the teenager boys interested in mathematics; for all the wrong reasons. She waved and said hello as she passed, legs pumping. He caught a quick glimpse of her bottom in bicycle shorts, as she disappeared over to the other side of the trees.

For a moment, he held her image in his arms and waltzed as best he could with the weight of his rod and bait bucket, before reality poked through the mirage, to make him realize that his open arms held the distance of a big fish "the one that got away." He reminded himself of his age, and the fine line between admiration and lecherousness and embarrassedly discarded his silly little fantasy.

He crossed the summit of the hill he had nicknamed Kilimanjaro. He went down the footpath to his "lucky" spot by the river just under the willow. There he unfolded his chair, baited his line, and cast it off into the mercurial water of the local river. The spot was secluded, the bushes and plants creating a little wall around him, where no one could see him and Jonah sat down to enjoy the gift of solitude.

Soon his senses became accustomed to his surroundings. The stuttering of the water across the stones, the smell of flowers, plants, and the rich silted wet soil squelching around his boots. He would have been content to pass the morning that way, lost in his thoughts. The river would have it otherwise on this fine Sunday.

Suddenly his line became taut. The rod gives, bending to the weight and force on the other end. In his excitement, Jonah almost fell off his chair, but he regained his balance, and grabbed the rod, and began to reel in what he hoped was an actual fish.

For what seemed like an eternity he struggled to bring the fish in. Yet, probably it was a matter of minutes. His old tired muscles strained, the line threatening to break, but holding fast. Then in the time, it had taken for the exciting battle to begin, the line went limp. Jonah reeled in the line to find to his amazement, the bloody head of a large carp, severed from its body like an aristocrat in the French revolution. The head dangling from the hook, his rod like a gallows's pole.

Taking the head as a point of the estimate, he stretched out his arms to calculate roughly how big the catch would have been. It would have been quite the whopper. Suddenly it dawned on him what had happened. An even bigger fish had taken advantage of the poor fish on the line and had had its lunch. He tried to do the same mental exercise for the predator. It had to be massive! Jonah looked at the decapitated fish and began to laugh a deep from the belly laugh. "The one that got away!" he said to himself. No one would believe him.