When you read this article you might get a sense of
been there, done that. Don’t worry you have not gone completely bonkers,
I used the piece on line twist in my last newsletter as the basis
of an article in the current (September) issue of NZ Fisherman magazine.
Dogma
Most aspects of human endeavour have collected their
share of dogma and cant. Trout fishing is one sport where a short-sighted,
blinkered view of how things could and should be done is rife amongst
a self appointed ‘elite’.
There are some in this sport of ours, thankfully only
a very few, that consider it some kind of duty to mystify and ritualize
trout fishing. Most of these seem to be in the fly-fishing fraternity.
They try to imbue trout fishing with an almost religious mysticism,
complete with rituals and conventions. These ‘purists’ attach
themselves to one form of trout fishing and will brook no deviation
from this ‘pure’ practice. Bah and humbug!
If you are new to fishing for trout and you encounter
someone who tries to convert you to ‘one way’, quickly run
one way – away.
But sometimes, it can take years for lessons learned
on the water to filter through the dogma and cant that getting older
seems to build up in the brain cells. We are supposed to get wiser
with age. As my boys persist in reminding me, my broad mind and narrow
waist have swapped places.
I am struck more and more often by the realization that
we humans love to make and apply rules to all sorts of activities,
and fishing is no exception. Trouble is, we extend this desire to
apply rules to try and cover creatures that have no knowledge of our
rules. More damning of our arrogance is that we try to imbue wild
animals, such as fish, with human traits that are derived from the
human ability for abstract thought. Abstract thought, the ability
to link apparently disparate things together to form a whole, is supposed
to be the thing that separates us from animals.
So we go on perpetuating the dogma, cant and rules,
forgetting one rule that has no exceptions. To do anything that is
exceptional requires – by definition – breaking the ‘rules’.
Catching an exceptional fish means doing something out of the ordinary,
something outside the rules, something exceptional.
If we continue to do things as we have always
done them, we can only expect to get the results we always have!