Doc's Perspective On Fishing In General

Why do we fish? For some, the answer is simply "for fun". Indeed, fishing for fun or fishing as a leisure time pursuit might have just that as its sole justification, and that would certainly seem to be justification enough. For others though, the reason for fishing is much more deeply rooted.

Odell Shepard in his classic Thy Rod and Thy Creel notes "No sooner does [the angler] feel the cool pressure of the ripples against his waders than all customary thoughts slip from him, floating away down the stream". He goes on to observe that "when a man is engaged in a business deal he smokes his pipe smoothly and continuously from match to white ash; that when he is writing ordinary prose he has to relight once in five minutes; that for poetical composition the average time between match and match is two minutes and a half; but that a trout-fisher in action smokes matches almost exclusively". Such is the level of concentration that fishing demands and the consumption of soul that it exacts on an angler. A trout rod is a magician's wand for exorcising the ghosts of care.

I have often been confronted with questions like "why do I waste my time fishing"? In fact, I must number family and close friends among those that pose such questions and still do not understand my apparent fascination with the sport. Stating that I enjoy it is not justification enough for them, but merely affirmation of some inherent flaw in my character. It is the same mentality that sees golfing as nothing more than knocking a small white ball around on a field of grass and consequently must view golfers to be of a similarly flawed character.

As a scientist who obtained his doctorate spending many years in the advanced study of predator and prey relationships, I find fishing to be most fascinating because it permits me to be both predator and prey at the same time. The emergent part of my being - mind, wrist, rod and reel - are predator while the distant lure at the end of my line is prey. And, unlike hunting, where I suppose the same analogy can be made, I can savor the rewards of the successful predator without actually killing my prey. It is that singular feature that distinguishes the angling sport from hunting the world's most dangerous game - an endeavor where one might also be at once predator and prey. Those that go on to deride catch and release fishing as a perversion I greet with eloquent silence.

Izzak Walton himself describes angling as a "contemplative sport". It is, as Shepard notes "more of life than actual living is, with moments of anguish and ecstacy crowded more closely together than they commonly are in other sorts of experience". Standing waist deep in a trout stream, the fisherman is standing metaphorically in the midst of life itself. As Shepard says "consider the almost universal belief that everyone desires to live forever, preserving his own individuality forever intact. What has the stream to say about that matter? Well, we see that it is moving steadily, as swiftly as possible and by the shortest possible course, toward the sea and the merging of its tiny self into a vastly greater. What sort of water is it that "lives forever" and preserves its identity intact? The stagnant pool, mantled with obscence scum and foul with all forms of death - Deeper teachings than this the stream has for all of us - as, how to mingle freedom with restraint and law with liberty. One who could understand wild water - as no man ever will - would be far on the road to understanding all things".

Whether standing waist deep in a Montana trout stream or on a tropical front beach flat, such teachings are there for anyone with the time to fish for them...

And then again, if such philosophical approaches to fishing are more than you care to embrace, you can always just fish for fun. No reasonable person could ever fault you for that.