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Date: November 29, 2004 at 00:36:47
From: ken, [pool-64-222-48-10.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: A confession of sorts.
When I was a young boy I fished a lot with my father. He was a good fisherman and a good storyteller. He told me lots of stories about all kinds of fish and took me lots of places.
He told me about giant tuna and landlocked salmon and trout and Largemouth bass and walleyes and many other kinds of fish and I was a good listener. He was an amateur fisherman. He loved to fish.
As I got older I fished less and less with him and more and more with others and eventually I started to fish with professional fishermen and began to mate and then became a captain myself.
When I did this there was an order to the business and if you wanted to learn, the most important thing to do was find a good captain that would hire you. There were lots of part time captains then even as now, and for the most part they were nice fellows who loved to fish so much that they got a license and a boat and fished part time or on their vacations from their real job. Most of them had never worked on a real charter boat with a real captain. Their mates were often relatives or sons or sons of friends.
When the fishing was good they were booked. When it was the beginning and the end of the season, the slow time, they weren’t.
Most of their business came from booking agents not their fish catching skill.
Some did very well and some got by.
The same is true today.
One thing that happened to me when I began to fish with full time captains is I had to contain my amateur love for fishing and I replaced it with a pragmatic view. I still loved fishing but I learned to use my mind not just my heart. This had a dramatic effect on my strategies in fishing.
I did not care as much about the single catching of a fish. During those years I was present to the catching of so many fish and many amazing fish like marlin and giants and scores of 30 to fifty pound bass that I was no longer enfatuated by the excitement of catching fish as an end in itself. I wanted to understand fishing in a different way than just focusing on the thrills of catching fish.
On the professional boats I learned that casting plugs was not the way to learn about fish. I found that secret lures were for catching fishermen and that jigs and pork rinds and tubes and measured wire line were tools for fishing systematically and not just preferences.
I had caught many fish in my life and I had been around fishermen all of my life but I had never seen nor imagined the giant
difference between loving to fish and knowing the results first hand of how to fish professionally.
(I am not talking about money just the systematic use of knowledge and skill that I witnessed for myself once I became a mate to an old full time charter boat skipper)
Up to that time a good day with the methods I was familiar with would have been a half dozen school bass or something of that order. A great day and full of satisfaction.
The first day on a charter boat had me landing fish all day long with no breaks and filleting fish at the dock for over an hour.
I remember the captain saying to me we had to catch the nut before noon and the nut was at least thirty bass. If we did not have the thirty then we were in trouble and we would not be back at the dock at three like everybody else.
Fishing was no longer something that just happened, it was important to produce. That made fishing productivly very real.
The reason for this little story is to tell you something that I think is very important if you want to break the spell of infatuation with the sizzle of fishing and get into the meat of it. You have to, “act,” as if you don’t care about catching them.
I know that sounds strange but in fact it makes perfect sense. Bear with me for a while.
I have a friend who is a very good fisherman. When I first met him he was not as good but he really wanted to be. He did not have a great deal of experience but he had some and so I took him fishing with me many, many times.
He loved to catch fish in fact, he would get excited just thinking about it even in the winter with sub-freezing temps.
When we would arrive at a spot and there were fish present he would almost run to get out a cast and hook that first fish.
That happens to me too. The only difference is I do not do it.
I want to but I don’t.
I told him that he can do that all he wants to but not when he is fishing with me.
His reaction was what we used to call,” On Tilt,” his head went askew and he shuddered and said, “O.K."
That was a very important step.
We began to watch fish together when we fished and moved a lot from feeding fish to other similar places where there were other feeding fish.
That was a revelation to him.
When he would catch a fish on his favorite lure I would suggest that he take the lure off and try another.
He didn’t want to do it but did it anyway.
He would try different lures and see if he could catch fish on several differenet ones at the same time.
He was often able to.
I would not let him use a surface lure because I told him that it was a placebo that would arrest his understanding of fishing no matter how much fun it was.
He wanted to fly fish.
I took him spin fishing.
He wanted to use secret lures I made him use red and white old-fashioned swimmers.
He wanted to catch all the fish he could and I would start the car and we would leave them.
I made him sharpen his hooks every time he hooked a fish and checked his hooks every time he missed a fish.
That is a short version of the time I spent with him and we still fish together often.
One night last year we stood next each other and used the same rod to fish with.
We were fishing at night in current and there were fish holding in front of us.
We used a secret lure and made it into a game.
One cast apiece and then change hands.
We caught forty-three bass on successive casts.
If you lost one you got another shot.
We never moved and there were other anglers there and we were unmerciful. After about twenty fish in a row they all left.
That is my confession.
I care about catching fish so much that I act as if I don’t so that I can learn.
So does my friend.
By the way he is a good fly fisherman now.
The unknown becomes the known if you push and break out of the prison of your routines.
The secret lure?
I just revealed it.
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