When I was a child, I was absolutely fascinated by my father fishing tackle box. It seemed to me that he had the most splendid 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 hand-tied and custom made by him. No one bought their own fishing supply equipment in those days, except for the basics like fishing line. If you were a good fisherman, you made your own. It wasn't just a matter of quality, but of pride.



It seems like, with the rapid advance of fishing supplies, a lot of the sport has been taken out of it these days. I went on a fishing trip with a friend, a fairly wealthy individual who possesses his own motor yacht. He actually has a GPS fishfinder, a weather radar gear, and various type of sophisticated equipment to find the schools of fish. Finding fish with him is not an art anymore. t is not a matter of instincts, of sport or luck. It simply is due to cold hard science - following the manual and letting the technology do the rest. To me, this takes all the fun out of it.

I dicussed this with him, and he said it was just a matter of him owning more sophisticated fishing supplies than my father had. He admitted that had they offered GPS fishfinders in fly fishing shops in my father's day, everyone would have purchased them. They wouldn't have spend time with hand tying their own fishing lures if they could right away know where to get the fish. I see things differently, however.

In my mind, what my father loved so much about fishing is the opportunity to commune with nature. 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 meant, when the fish came out, how precisely to land the line, and which fishing supplies to utilise in which part of the year. It was a meditative activity that concerned his whole mind. Everything had to be done perfectly in order for him to succeed at it. It wasn't just an issue of looking at the radar and dropping a line.