Let's go fishing

I had never fished for piranha before I went to the Amazon, but I did spend many days as a child fishing for trout with my dad. I was born in the Lake District, a beautiful rural area in the north of England, and I spent all of my childhood and adolescence growing up in its breathtaking landscape. To this day my parents still live there in a house on a hill overlooking the Eden Valley, with a view that money can not buy. Looking out of the living room through the floor to ceiling windows, the green valley lays spread out for miles below with fells in the distance on both sides. To the left lies the "sleeping elephants", fells that when the sun shines resemble a herd of elephants laid flat out, their lined, dry skin clearly visible. And to the right stands the many fells that surround Lake Ullswater and its neighbouring lakes. I really could not have been more fortunate as a child as the beauty of the area provided many activities to keep me occupied, one of these activities was fishing.

My dad has always had a great interest in fishing and it was one of the few activities in which me and my three siblings accompanied him. Our favorite place to fish was on the River Eden in a place called Bluebell Wood. I do not know to this day if this is the actual name of the wood, or in fact me and my siblings invented the name due to the number of bluebell flowers growing there. It was a well established wood with tall trees, closely packed together creating a large shady area underneath. At a certain time of year the ground of this shaded area was a carpet of blue and lilac as the bluebells hung delicately from their from their long thin stalks. The slightest breeze caused the bells of the flowers to shake, and so the carpet appeared to be moving. And it was here that we sat upon a broken tree on many a sunny afternoon, rod in hand, bait in the water, waiting not always so patiently for a bite. Sat in a boat on the River Negro, again rod in hand, waiting for the piranhas to bite, I remembered this happy childhood memory.