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Fish with Bish Newsletter
September 1999

New Article – Twist and shout

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!

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