When I was a child, I was really fascinated by my father fishing tackle box. It appeared to me that he had the most wonderful and wide-ranging fishing supplies you could dream of. With his fishing tackle he could trick any fish there was, or so I thought. He had a lot of flies and lures, most of them custom and hand-tied made by him. Except for the basics like fishing line, no one bought their own fishing supply equipment in those days. Every good fisherman made their own. It was a matter of pride as well as a matter of quality.
It seems like, with the rapid advance of fishing equipments, a lot of the sport has been taken out of lately. I spent some time on a fishing trip with a friend, a quite wealthy person who owns his own motor yacht. He actually has a GPS fishfinder, a weather radar gear, and various sort of fancy equipment to find the schools of fish. Finding fish with him is not an art anymore. It is not due to instincts, of sport or luck. It simply is due to cold hard science - following the instructions and letting the technology do that work. For me, this is taking all the fun out of it.
I dicussed this with him, and he told me it was just a matter of him owning more fancy fishing supplies than my dad had. He admitted that had they offered GPS fishfinders in fly fishing shops in my father's day, everybody would have bought them. They wouldn't have wasted time with hand tying their own fishing lures if they could instantly know where to get the fish. I however, see things in a different way.
The opportunity to commune with nature, in my mind, is what my father loved so much about fishing. Yes he was out there to catch fish, but in the course he had to make out everything about a stretch of river. He had to know every wave and what it signified, what time of day the fish came out, how precisely to land the line, and which fishing equipment to take in which part of the year. It was a thinking activity that involved his whole being. In order for him to succeed at it, everything had to be done perfectly. It wasn't just an issue of watching the radar and dropping a line.
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