My first impulse when I start a project, especially a writing project, is to begin with an overview of the basics as I see them. When I do this, I often create distinctions between different aspects of the thing I am trying to describe and go from there. I suppose there will come a day to do this for angling, but I am less convinced it is the path for this project.
Truth be told, after a lifetime of angling, I am discovering new techniques and traditions but, more importantly, a new concept of angling. This is not about an idea so much as a newfound disposition. I have found a new vocabulary of fishy feelings, a fresh set of senses for angling.
I think I have resisted the “new” label for this because I have been doing much of it for my entire life. I guess some of it is just pride: I don’t want to be treated like a newbie. I also want to honour my past and, above all, my past fishing teachers and mentors who are almost all family members. Come to think of it, unlike my relationship to the guitar, where most of my growth happened as an autodidact and from players who were perfect strangers, angling has been a decidedly family affair.
That familial sense continues in this new season of growth. I am on this journey with my own immediate nuclear family and, in a unique way, with my daughter (and our dog, Lucius). As much as I still want to honour the past, I think it is more important to live in this present of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia with my most immediate family and the friends I have made on these shores. I also must admit that my daughter’s pure love of fishing and devotion to her casting has really been something of a revelation.
I am not sure if I first loved catching or fishing, but I do know that I was driven by the numbers, from retention limits to fish size. This doesn’t mean I never got skunked, but I did pride myself on often being able to pull a fish on an otherwise dead day of fishing or the big fish of a productive day. Sometimes, I have been able to key-in on something technical and outcatch a whole public pier or marina.
I use the term outcatch because I am less and less sure that this is really about fishing. It is mostly about my ego. Some of it is social: I do love to share my catch with family and friends. But I cannot see this numbers-driven obsession as a pure act of generosity; I see it now as a limitation, albeit something to keep in mind under the right circumstances and situations. Keep the good fruit, spit out the pit.
There is a spectrum of catching, where you begin with an effective but sporty approach and then adjust from there to increase the chances of catching when it doesn’t pan out, or increase the difficulty when the bite comes easy. This spectrum is helpful and important for being flexible and literate as an angler, but it can also create certain habits and complacencies that overvalue catching and, as a result, limit one’s relationship to fishing.
Perhaps catching is just a different kind of fishing, for different times. My grandfather regaled us with stories of 6-foot alligator gar hanging from trees after being caught at night on the Rio Grande, but we all knew those days were long gone. In a similar way, the great steelhead fishery of the Thompson River is but a distant, tragic memory and salmon returns and water temperatures for resident trout are measured with a solemn sense of fragility. Maybe catching was a way to fish in times of plenty, but these are different times; these are times for a sense of fishing that is less about numbers for possession and more about numbers for survival and dreams of future flourishing. (Of course this doesn’t mean I think the recreational fishery is the driver of these numbers so much as an easy scapegoat, but it doesn’t change the ethical imperative.)
I used to think that catch-and-release fishing and those who fished with detachment about catching were simply poor anglers who consoled themselves with pleasant fictions. Perhaps I have fallen into their fiction. Or, perhaps, I was simply wrong about them. Regardless, there is something else to think about now: casting.
I have never found casting to be very difficult and, while I did take some measure of pride in my ability to cast accurately or across a great distance, I treated it as a tool and nothing more. Sure, it is nice to know how to double-haul or flip a jig into a logjam, but they are nothing that merit much, if any, dedication to learn. They come with practice and develop on the water. Since taking up the centrepin reel and double-handed fly rod, however, I have grown to respect the cast and seek out the advice of better casters.
Most of this research and learning is done on YouTube—so many hours of YouTube— but there are locals like Matt Bentley, Aidan Cudmore, Tim Arsenault, Rod Toth, Matt Sharp, Gavin Lau, Jordan Simpson, and Eric Peake who have given me lots of advice and even some on-the-water instruction for my BC swing, Wallace cast, and spey casting. (I hope to talk more about these folks and perhaps publish some interviews with them here.) Maybe the new levels of difficulty and technical rigour of casting have contributed to my growing sense of a separation between fishing and catching.
I probably needed to learn these lessons a long time ago, but I haven’t been able to see my own weakness in the same way until now. I have always been an angler who overfishes a hole, even to the point of futility. I will cast at a rising fish long after it is clear they are not taking the fly I am offering or, worse still, will over fish a small honey hole with a friend fishing behind me, leaving the pool stale. Casting may not cure this, but I think the grid of a swing or float pattern that follows each cast is a good marker for moving along and letting the fish come to me.