Dynamite fishing sounds fun in principal. It’s not though. The shockwave damages the environment and kills loads of animals the fisherman isn’t even interested in. When I say environment I don’t mean it’ll dislodge shopping trolleys and kick up some mud. I’m talking about nations with fragile eco-systems, supporting coral and numerous habitats under the water. This is the reason it’s banned in many places. That and the fact that it erodes the, frankly shaky, argument that fishing is a sport. I can buy into it as a hobby, but a sport? No chance. Lots of people have hobbies but I’ve never heard anyone claim that flying a kite makes them a sportsman.
Anyway, in a comparison that I refuse to believe is coincidence, fishermen have often told me that you can get drunk (in the same way as cricket fans cite it as one of the primary lures). Once again I’m forced to point out that these activities are surely designed with nothing more in mind than escaping the house and ‘the wife’. Surely getting a divorce would be easier in the long run?
Yet, because it remains so popular, a trip to the shops reveals magazine shelves which are awash with numerous fishing magazines, each adorned by some middle-aged hairy bloke, wearing far too much plastic, proudly holding aloft a fish of three feet in length. What is there to write? Once you’ve got past the opening sentence what can you really write about? “I caught this beast in a local lake, mainly because it’s too stupid to understand the concept of not eating something which is impaled by a metal hook.”
I’ve never looked, but I can guess what else is in them. People think that geeks are confined to comic books or PCs, but it’s not true. Geeks exist everywhere, they just have different chosen fields. I imagine these magazines are chock-full of the latest titanium fishing rods and next generation string (or should that be ‘line’? I don’t know). The fisherman can impress his friends with his new lightweight rod, costing (probably) hundreds of pounds because it weighs three ounces less and bends just the right amount when you’re trying to haul the kraken onto the side of the bank (next to the box of empty Budweiser bottles).
Seriously, I understand fishing less than just about any other ‘sport’ on the planet. Nothing happens, for hours. Cricket spends a lot of time without anything happening but at least there is a bloke with a big bat trying to smash a ball into orbit. With fishing, people will catch a fish, study it for a couple of minutes and often lob it straight back into the water. Aquariums would save them a lot of time in this pursuit. On one hand, I can’t say I blame them for throwing their prey back. I’d be perplexed if the fish didn’t come out ready battered with a side order of chips too. At least you’d have been rewarded for getting up so early and freezing to death. It’d certainly be more appealing than mucking about with a tin of maggots; that’s not any kind of breakfast.
Parenting, I think, has a lot to do with this. Invariably when you talk to a fishing type and the origins of their interest, their eyes glaze over as they reminisce about watching the sunrise with their dad, on the side of a bank, fishing rod in hand. These memories are flawed. The human brain likes to remember nice things. It’s why every old person in the world claims things were ‘better in their day’. There was no crime, the air was clean and they could leave their front door open. Apparently.
Rubbish. They just don’t remember the bad things. It’s the same with fishing. In the real world these people (when they were kids) were probably sat, huddled, on a muddy bank while sideways rain hit them in the face. They shivered with the cold as their father swore loudly, slipping over in the mud and dropping his beer. They had been told to stop moaning when woken at 4am to pack the gear into the car and things wouldn’t get any better for the rest of the day. The father wouldn’t concede defeat to the weather and was not about to give up his day of self indulgence to return to the wife and demands of assistance with the house work. Worse than that, the father saw the whole experience as a time to bond with his half-frozen son. And then, once in six years, there was a lovely sunrise, and all was well. That’s the memory the son retains, years later, when he drags his son out of bed before dawn and the cycle repeats itself.
On any given Sunday I reckon you’ll find thousands of fathers on the banks of our rivers regaling their disinterested sons with tales of beautiful mornings and hauls of fish that would make a Spaniard proud. Meanwhile, the son would much rather his dad just bought him Fisherman Pro 2017 (or something) for his Playstation so that he could stay in bed and choose to have the beautiful sunrise at a more sensible time, say, at around 2pm.
