When I was a child, I was really fascinated by my father fishing tackle box. It seemed to me that he had the most splendid and varied fishing supplies you could imagine. He could trick any fish there was with his fishing tackle, or so I thought. He had many different flies and lures, most of them hand-tied and custom created 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 was a matter of pride as well as a matter of quality.

It appears like, with the fast evolution of fishing supplies, a lot of the sport has been taken out of lately. I spent some time on a fishing trip with a friend, a fairly wealthy mal who possesses his own motor yacht. He actually has a GPS fishfinder, a weather radar gear, and various kind of sophisticated equipment to find the schools of fish. Finding fish with him isn't an art anymore. It is not due to instincts, of sport or luck. It is just due to cold hard science - following the manual 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 said it was only a matter of him owning more sophisticated fishing supplies than my father had. He admitted that had they offered GPS fishfinders in fly fishing stores in my father's day, everyone would have bought them. They wouldn't have wasted time with hand tying their own fishing lures if they could right away identify 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 process he had to discern everything on the stretch of river. He had to be familiar with every wave and what it meant, what time of day the fish came out, how exactly to land the line, and which fishing equipment to use in which part of the year. It was a meditative activity that involved his whole mind. In order for him to succeed at it, everything had to be done perfectly. It wasn't just a matter of looking at the radar and dropping a line.