June 20, 2008

Fishing: Facts & Fantasies, Fibs & Frolics

The tremendous struggle had just started between the game-seeker’s primitive instinct to capture and possess, and the valiant prey’s raw, savage and elemental nature to escape for sheer survival.
I reeled in, he ran out. I reeled in again, and he ran out again. For how long the battle lasted, I cannot honestly say, for I had become unconscious of time or space. I was aware of only two things –I at one end and he at the other of the line.  It was a tussle between his stamina against mine.
The verve and vigor of a strong, 10-15 pound, fish struggling for its very life was pitted against an elderly fisherman whose enthusiasm for the sport had waxed with age while his stamina to handle such a fight had waned imperceptibly. 
The moment my tired arm muscles admitted instinctively a slack on the line, he gave a mighty jerk, broke it and got away.  
As I pulled in the line and looked wistfully at its snapped end, I noticed the sympathetic features of the other anglers on the boat. What some muttered in Spanish was beyond me, perhaps a remark or two on my inept and tardy handling of the fight. I was reminded of the old man in Ernest Hemingway’s  masterpiece “Old man and the Sea”. Evidently, I lacked the requisite skill, stamina, strength and above all the faculty to focus totally on the challenge.
I recalled an observation of the famous wit and lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson:  “A fishing rod is a long pole with a line and hook at one end and a fool at the other.”
Then, I remembered a cartoon I had seen decades back in which an inmate of a lunatic asylum leans over the wall of his institution and calls to a fisherman in the boat in the adjacent lake: 
“Hi there; how is fishing, how many did you catch?”
“None so far”.
“How long you been fishing?”
“Four hours”
“Man, you sure are on the wrong side of this wall.”
My sons and I have been fishing each season for several years past, off the Baja coast in Mexico taking a fishing boat from Encinada. It was our first trip this year and it was prompted by a report that the yellowtail tuna had started running. The press report in the second week of June about the arrival of yellowtails tempted us to go for them.  The only way to get rid of temptation, says Oscar Wilde, is to yield to it. We did yield, despite the 150- mile drive each way. 
 Mexico is a mighty good neighbor and mighty good supplier of illegal immigrants. The people are fun loving. A couple of years back we saw the entire city of Encinada celebrating the 4th of July with song, dance, partying and fireworks as much as do the Americans.   In any case it is a better place to hibernate, and of course to fish the yellowtail or barracuda particularly when you feel an acute biological need for open spaces.
A non-angler like Dr. Johnson might think fishing to be easy or foolish. But, a great fisherman is charged with an intense, predatory urge to conquer and capture. He is at heart an Alexander, a Napoleon or a Tamerlane rendered docile by circumstances.  He undergoes all that struggle to land a real fighting fish, but then releases it back into its habitat like Alexander showing magnanimity towards a humbled Poras.
Fishing is a recreation and a calmer of unquiet thoughts.  President Herbert Hoover referred to fishing as “One of the few opportunities given a President for the refreshment of his soul and the clarification of his thoughts by solitude.”  He maintained, “Fishing is a chance to wash one’s soul with pure air. It brings meekness and inspiration, reduces our egotism, smoothes our thoughts and shames our wickedness. It is discipline in the equality of man  or all men are equal before the fish.”
Another President and an avid angler, Jimmy Carter, in his book “An Outdoor Journal” contends: “How often these (fishing and hunting) trips of only a few days or even hours have turned into real adventure, magnified in importance and stretched in time by the pleasures of anticipation and the precious memories that never seem to fade away.”
While scores of US Presidents have fished holding the office, fewer than a dozen were skilled enough to do it holding a rod. To quote again Herbert Hoover, “No political aspirant can qualify for election unless he demonstrates he is a fisherman, there being 25 million persons who pay annually for a license to fish.”
You can easily differentiate between the real addicts and those who occasionally pick up their rods and tackle to satisfy their urge for open space and escape from the hustle and bustle of city life.
The true devotees stand out by their attire –worn-out clothes, dirty old shoes and weather-beaten hats- and their lingo of the subculture, the aristocracy of anglers. They would easily comprehend what is meant by ‘fiberglass integrated with unidirectional graphite’ or expressions such as ‘riprap’, ‘cheater hook’, ‘Texas rig’, ‘crank bait’, and ‘triggering’.  They seem wedded only to their rod and tackle like the motorbike gangs with their gigantic two wheelers, leather jackets, hirsute figures, tattoos and shoulder length manes.
As for the non-devotees like me, fishing is no obsession but an attractive sport, an excuse for an outing, a change from the routine, an opportunity to be in your own company to sort out your personal ticklish problems and, to an extent, also a game of challenge and response.  We win some, we lose some. But, generally we do not talk much about our expeditions.
The most common category is that of the casual fisherperson. I have deliberately used the word ‘person’ as more and more women are joining this class.  Their attire, fresh and gaudy, their fishing kits shinny and overflowing, and their coolers sporting dozens of beer or soda cans and their baskets full of delicacies.  Many bring their children along. These are essentially fresh air fiends, looking for something different from their routine city life to talk about to their friends and neighbors. 
For a first yellowtail, there is no habitat so lush and great as such an angler’s memory. It not only lives but also thrives there, increasing in weight, shape and spirit with each passing year until it is large enough to be stuffed as a trophy for a wall in the local anglers’ club.
As for the fish that got away, it was of course still bigger.  According to their tales, some of those fish had a mastery of escape routines that would have put Houdini to shame. Some were so smart that the listeners would wonder whether they actually were fish or Rhodes scholars or the fish version of child genius.  
Descriptions of such persons’ fishing trips constitute an exchange of illusions. Mutual respect maintains the myth of the big one that got away. Don Marques was not being charitable when he remarked: “Fishing is a delusion surrounded by liars in old clothes.”  Of course, exaggeration is a common addiction among the anglers. But to call them outright liars is perhaps quite unfair. You may refer to the weakness, in the words of Winston Churchill, as a “terminological inexactitude”.  
But, if you insist you must utter the truth, particularly as it does not concern you, you had better ponder first over what Oscar Wilde has to say about it: “The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.