My grandmother was fishing before women doing that kind of thing had a name. She was out on the water with a rod in her hand while my grandfather sat on the bank, and she was better at it than he was. She is 102 years old now. She never made a big deal of it. It was just what she did.

I think about her a lot when I’m out early. Before the light comes up properly. Before anyone else is on the water.

I moved to Darwin at nineteen with no plan and a growing obsession with fishing, and the Territory delivered on every front. The water here is unlike anywhere I’ve been. The colour of it. The species. The particular stillness of a billabong at first light, before the heat arrives and the birds go quiet.

But I didn’t belong in it. Not in the way I wanted to.

I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to love something and still feel like an outsider in it. The fishing community I found myself in was welcoming enough on the surface. But there were messages, quiet ones, nothing spoken aloud, that told me I was a guest. That this wasn’t quite mine. I wasn’t seeing myself reflected back anywhere I looked.

So I walked away. For a decade, I barely fished. I told myself I’d grown out of it.

I hadn’t grown out of it.

A phone call came. A last-minute spot in a women’s fishing competition. I almost didn’t go. I went. And there were two hundred women standing at the water’s edge, and something in my chest shifted in a way I still find hard to put into words. These were my people. They had always been my people. I just hadn’t known where to find them.

That was the beginning of everything that came after.

Now I fish the Top End. I tag Saratoga for citizen science, out on the billabongs with my partner Shane, contributing data to research that tracks these fish across NT waterways. I’m part of the Women’s Recreational Fishing League, a community of women working toward a day when gender parity in recreational fishing doesn’t need a name because it’s just the way things are.

And I write. Honestly, slowly, about fishing and everything that happens around it.

This Substack is where I bring that writing. Not the highlight reel. The real stuff. The session that didn’t go to plan. The fish that changed how I think about the fishery. The moment someone picks up a rod for the first time and their whole face changes.

Some weeks it will be a personal essay. Some weeks a reflection on something happening in the fishing or conservation world. Some weeks it will just be a moment from the water that I can’t stop thinking about.

There are no paywalls here. If you’re here, you get everything.

If you’re a woman who has always thought fishing was someone else’s thing, I wrote this for you.

If you’re someone curious about what it looks like to show up fully to a space that wasn’t built with you in mind, and stay anyway, I wrote this for you too.

And if you love fishing and you want more of the real conversation around it, you are absolutely welcome here.

You can find more of my writing at emmaloufishing.com. Or you can just stay here, and I’ll bring it to you.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

Emma

One post, every week. Free, always.