That thrilled me to no end. Even if sometimes a little company is nice on the water. It’s a truly wonderful thing to watch your daughter shriek with delight as the old Chinese guy casting for dinner along the Rideau Canal pulls in a sunfish. Just like it’s great to be watching through your son’s eyes as the line he has thrown out barely misses a pair of scuba divers looking for something below the surface in Halifax Harbour.

If you’re after larger-than-life men engaged in heroic deeds, it must now be apparent, the city shoreline is not the place to find them. Even so, there’s a banality to urban fishing that’s comforting. Ricky Anderson of Halifax, a former Canadian welterweight boxing champ and another late convert to city fishing, knows precisely what I’m talking about. “My brother-in-law introduced me to it in 1995,” he explains. “My mother had passed away and I was grieving. The first time I threw that line out I felt at peace.”

Now Anderson and his sons live for the annual run of mackerel through Halifax Harbour. When they’re on the move, if your timing is right, you can get three or four mackerel on the line in a few seconds. I’ve never actually experienced that rush: whenever my kids and I arrived, the miraculous event had just ended and there were always a couple of guys walking away with buckets full of fish. (Mackerel, because of the quick tour they make of Halifax Harbour, are perhaps the only edible fish caught in those murderously polluted waters). We’d hustle down anyway to fling heavy lead-headed jigs with spinning rods as far into the current as possible. An old boot or a child’s doll would float past. Occasionally, we might even see a seal. In the fall it gets cold fast on the Halifax arm. Yet, we were always pleased to just stand there, steam coming off our breath, doing something just this side of pointless.