What is Fishing

Famous for being THE most popular participation sport, meaning more people fish than play football. In America, the sport has been raised to the status of a spectator sport, with sponsored professional anglers touring the country, fishing a professional league of competitions, just like the golf leagues. The best pro anglers also collect BIG pay cheques too and enjoy a super star status.

So what is it about fishing that makes people like me, want to sit still for hours in the rain, on a stool, crouched over, to stare intensely at the line, waiting for it to twitch, arm poised like a coiled spring, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting piscatorial creature lurking within the murky depths of the featureless concrete pond and actually paying for the privilege of nursing a strained back for the rest of the evening.

It's not a food thing, as all the fish are released at the end of the session. In a competition, it is the desire to win, to catch more or bigger fish than your opponent. Understandable, but even if there was no prize or even any other anglers to compete with, I would still be there, wiping my slimy hands on my shorts, so there must be more to this addiction.

The true competition is man versus the fish, although it hardly seems like a fair fight, the fish having the brain the size of a pea and driven by total instinct, but if you believed some of the stuff written on fishing blogs, you would think that fish possessed more intelligence than the hunter himself and in many cases this is probably true.

I think fishing appeals to a basic instinct of man, it is all about the 'hunter/gatherer' thing, reaching back to those archival memories of an era when men went out and hunted for food while the women made dresses. Even in this modern world we live in today, those basic instincts still survive, men want to hunt and women make dresses!

I did consider switching comments off for this post, leaving you all screaming at your computers in frustration, but I changed my mind.

Dave