The wonderful world of fishing, cricketing and the majesty of the islands

Cricketing, you ask? Yes, that’s what you’re doing when you’re playing cricket – which is basically the national sport of Antigua & Barbuda, where my fiancée and I have been since late last week on a well-earned vacation.

Ok, so I threw you for a bit of a loop. We’re not scouting out locations for anything, we’re just relaxing. Also, I’m pretty sure “crickteting” isn’t a word – although I can tell you with absolute certainty that a person playing cricket is a “cricketer.”

And yeah, these really are the most important issues on the table in a country as beautiful and relaxed as Antigua – pronounced AN-TEE-GA, by the way.

Being the sporting people we are, however, this trip has been far from the all-inclusive beach drink fest you might think a pair of 27-year-olds who are just months away from tying the knot would be on.

Rather than drink ourselves silly at a resort, we’ve been cruising around the countryside on all-terrain vehicles, riding jet-skis to and fro, tossing a football on the beach, and yesterday we went fishing for the first time.

Now here’s a sports that’s surprisingly fun.

Pardon me for my ignorance of fishing, but before yesterday, I had never so much as been out on a fishing boat, let alone hooked a line or caught one of those slimy little bastards.

Well, now I’ve caught six! (Five little ones and an 11-ounce jackfish – for the record)

More impressive? Johanna caught four, including two tasty snappers that we were actually able to eat. And yeah, she beat me in terms of size, too – her big catch was a 13-ouncer. Hey, there’s no shame in being beaten by a pretty girl, fellas.

But I digress – fishing, it would appear, is all about patience and knowing just when to strike.

When coming across it on TV, I’ve always been quick to change the channel for fear of boredom as well as the immediate dismissal of such as a sport. Four drunk guys tossing a hook in the water and waiting? How could that be a sport?

Well, what I never realized is that fishing takes extreme concentration and a specialized technique for actually hooking the little buggers. No, they don’t just swim up and say “eat me,” believe it or not, they actually don’t want to be caught.

The trick, it would seem, is to snap the line upward just when the fish sneaks up to your hook – some 19 feet below the surface – and snag it in the cheek before it can steal your bait. Then it’s a race to the top during which the fisherman is struggling to get the fish out of the water and the fish is trying to get the hook out of its face.

Definitely not for the faint of heart.

But definitely for someone who enjoys a tasty piece of snapper.