The fisherman will already know that a ‘gaff’ is a large hook on a pole which you use for landing fish. A friend of ours lost his arm in an industrial accident. Ron thought this was a boring way of losing a limb and certainly not worth the trouble, so he decided to embellish a bit, not being the sort of bloke to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn

Bush Poetry by Ronnie Wilson

Fishermen closely guard from inspections,
All the secrets on which he relies.
Being vaguely loose with directions,
And the colours of his lures and flies.

But to tell this tale now before me,
For sole purpose of raising a laugh.
With tradition I’ll just have to break free,
In the tale of “The Human Gaff”.

See me and Chris, we call him C”J”,
Had a unique way of landing our cod.
We’d first catch them in the normal way,
Then bring them to the boat with the rod.

But we never had the usual “gaff” or “net”,
To pull the fish up into the boat.
Still we managed and hardly ever got wet,
By ripping them out by the throat.

See when you lift a fish’s head from water,
He has no choice but to open his gob.
And hanging back near his aorta,
Is this dirty big red dangly job.

Now it takes most of the arm just to reach it,
And all of your strength to hold once you do.
Cause the fish don’t like cold fingers one bit,
And generally try pretty hard to shoot through.

Well for years we were kings of the weir pool,
Catching cod by the tonsils at will.
And apart from being covered in fish drool,
Chris really perfected the skill.

But our method backfired on one tragic day.
And Chris, he now has an arm missing/
The tragedy befell us during a coastal holiday.
Were we tried our luck at “Shark Fishing”.

I’ll go no further with details all bloody and gory,
‘Cept that the day finished on a happier note.
Cause once the snapper got a whiff of that burly,
We set a new catch record for our boat.

And now Chris he is happier than ever,
With a new bionic arm and a steel hook for a hand.
And he thinks them city docs were so very clever,
To give him a gaff for the fish that we land.

© Ron Wilson