Fishing

Those unfamiliar with fishing think of it as a patience game involving sitting by a pond or lake with a hook in the water. While this is one version of the truth, and while this may be enjoyable (especially in combination with good friends, alcohol, or both) – this hardly represents all that fishing has to offer. Fishing doesn’t always involve patience: many styles of fishing are active sports where participants chase wild creatures to experience a sacred tug of war.

Before 2016, I had only gone fishing a couple of times. Once was when I was very young – it was with my dad and family friends on an east coast party boat. We didn’t catch much of anything, except one very persistent bait-stealing ray. Another time I went to the local pond with a high school classmate, and we caught some stocked catfish. My mom refused to cook the catfish and made me release them in a stream near our home. The very next day a red-tailed hawk devoured the poor fish on our back lawn.

These being my experiences, I told my partner “I would like to eat a fish that I’ve caught,” and she surprised me in May of 2016 with a chartered trip on San Francisco bay. It wasn’t a particularly good fishing day, but I caught an 8lbs Halibut, the biggest fish of the trip. The powerful fish bent my rod, pulled the line, and just like that I was hooked.

I’m an engineer, so it did occur to me that fishing with hook and line is not an efficient way to procure fish for food. There’s also a luck component, which people overrate the same way they overrate the role of luck in poker. If I can go to any old grocery store and buy fish, why should I care to learn to fish? And if nets are more efficient than hook-and-line, why bother with this outmoded technique?

To understand this, it’s important to let go of the “fish as food” aspect of fishing. Certainly, if you want to eat fish, supermarkets are the lowest effort method of scoring something yummy. Instead, the factors that made catching an 8lbs Halibut so enthralling included:

• The surprise of encounter: before we hooked up, I didn’t know what kind of fish would be at the end of the line, I didn’t know how big it would be, and I didn’t know when it would bite. There is an enormous amount of excitement when you see line beginning to peel off the reel, and when you hear the drag of the reel screeching.
• The intensity of the fight: fishing with hook and line really boils down to a tug-of-war between person and fish. The fish is trying hard to get away – the rod and reel are applying an amount of pressure in the opposite direction, and as the fish tires, the human is cranking the fish closer and closer so that it can be netted and brought aboard / ashore. You can feel the vibrations as the fish swims and shakes its head. When you get it close to the boat, the fish often gets a burst of adrenaline and shoots off on another big run. The experience is bananas.
• The beauty of nature: it felt magical to find a big powerful creature in its natural habitat and to then feel it in my hands. It was correspondingly sad when the deckhands bonked it with a bat and bled the creature to make it good for consumption. What’s very cool about fishing, unlike hunting, is that you do have the option to let the fish go at the end, and if you handle them correctly, they return to nature unharmed. What you win in this exchange is an intimate moment with mother nature. It’s the same impulse that drives folks to go on safaris or to visit an aquarium.

One joyful aspect that I felt missing on this particular trip was:

• The satisfaction of skill: on a party boat, gear is provided to you and deckhands help you tie knots, rigs, and untangle when you mess up. The captain decides where to drive the boat to give clients the best chance at hooking up with a fish. Beyond dropping a line and reeling at the most exciting moment, there is not much you need to do.

Having finally caught a good-eating fish, I became very excited about learning to recreate this experience from scratch. Instead of relying on someone else to know where the fish are, what they’re eating, and setting things up, I wanted to be able to do this independently.

However I would soon discover that the world of fishing is vast. I wished there was a curriculum for learning the sport of fishing end to end, and there is not really such a thing. All-encompassing books like Ken Shultz’s Fishing Encyclopedia only really make sense once you’ve gotten into the sport.

So that is what this is. The plan is to provide a general curriculum for folks who want to learn about fishing.

I grew up on the east coast near Raritan Bay, and currently live on the west coast near San Francisco Bay, and I’ve fished all around the country. I’ve surf fished for striped bass in Rhode Island, fly fished for trout in Montana, caught largemouth bass in Texas, smallmouth bass in Michigan, spotted bay bass in San Diego, and reef fish in Hawaii. The one kind of fishing I will not be including information on is ice fishing, which I haven’t had the opportunity to do, but you can be sure it’s on my bucket list!

Did that last paragraph sound like a bunch of jibberish? That’s okay! The point is, this guide will be relevant no matter where you are fishing. And it’s just a starting point: once you know the terminology, you will be able to make use of all the resources on the internet (especially YouTube) to continue learning more.