We so often take our senses for granted. Here is a truly inspirational and informative lesson shared by Ms. Imbar Golt from Israel...

How Do Blind People Fish?

When I was very young, my father introduced me to fishing. He let me hold the rod with him while the float bobbed on the water and the sinker fell slowly to the bottom of our favourite lake. At first, I just held it to get a feeling of what it's like when fish are not biting. And then, slowly, my father taught me how to fish in earnest.

By holding the rod, I could feel if a fish pulled. I learned how to pull the rod in the right way so that my father could get the fish off the hook. Later, when I fished with rollers and a vertical rod, I could hear the bell when a fish pulled and reel in the line with the roller.

Baiting the hook was a challenge. I needed to feel everything on the hook and also do the baiting, and that sometimes takes more than two hands. I developed a method of holding the hook with both hands with the bait in my right hand, which was my better one. We started off with wooden replicas of hooks and just bread for bait. Then, we moved to regular hooks, and the bait turned to meat when I mastered the bread.

Tying the weights was a bit tricky at first. The line is so thin and sometimes slippery, and it was tough to thread and tie on the weights. I started with the thicker lines, and later I gained the dexterity that allowed me to tie the small weights onto the thinner lines.

Fishing from a boat or a rock in the water was fun. I could feel the fish better and raise the lines almost by myself, because you don't have to pull backwards like I did when fishing from land.

I could never master the art of throwing the line a long distance. Also, taking fish off the line was tricky because of their flopping and shaking. I just grabbed the hook and tried to free it from the fish's mouth, and it wriggled and slipped away.

Nowadays, my father is old and does not fish anymore. I troll only the Internet, but the fishing memories will remain with us for good.