Fly Fishing Sucks

WHY FLY FISH WHEN YOU CAN PLAY GOLF, GO SURFING OR USE A MEDITATION APP? PLAGUED BY OFFERS TO GO FLY FISHING, MATTHEW FREEMANTLE CONSULTED THE INTERWEBS FOR ANSWERS.

Most people, when they reach the age of 38, have found satisfactory ways to fill their days. I am one of those people. There is no such thing as spare time and, if new hobbies are to be accommodated, older ones have to make way. Like a packed nightclub, it’s a “one in, one out” policy. So, when someone suggested recently that I try fly fishing, I knew immediately and with a pang of annoyance that something beloved would have to be sacrificed.

Some pastimes are more demanding than others. Golf must be among the hardest to love from the outside. It takes forever, it’s expensive and it’s mainly about being reminded of an age that should long since have passed, where poor men carry the possessions of rich men on their backs.

Surfing is also notorious, even if there are fewer bigots in the surfing world. I have lost a lot of good friends to surfing. Interactions with these bygone pals are now a waste of time, for them too, I suspect. They stare, sheepeyed and distracted while you speak, more concerned with the twitching leaf just behind your head that suggests the wind has changed offshore. They are lost to the world of non-surfing, which, it is worth remembering, consists of everything else wonderful in the world.

Love it or loathe it, surfing, like golf and fly fishing, is clearly a potent drug. If sober, sensible people have been mesmerised - and, to my mind, badly simplified - by it, then their charms cannot be denied. If you try one of these activities, you will want to do it again, and again, until eventually it’s all you’ll want to do. It is at least worth considering that you needn’t try them at all.

Obsessive sports like the aforementioned tend to be quite difficult, take a very long time and are best enjoyed alone, surrounded by nature. The same can certainly be said about fishing and even more so about its highfalutin’ cousin, fly fishing. Because it threatens to rob me of precious time, it is with fly fishing chiefly that I have an axe to grind.

The trouble is, fly-fishers won’t take no for an answer. Their reaction is worse than cheerful persuasion, it is total bafflement. They are so confident in the appeal of their

passion that they cannot understand why you wouldn’t want to do it too. So began the obvious necessity to find as many reasons not to do it as possible. To this end, I set about trawling the world wide web to put forward the case against fly fishing, which is a perfectly normal thing to do although I risked veering horribly wide of my editor’s brief

It may be true that you can have anything confirmed by the internet - I recently saw someone give The World of Birds, a sanctuary for sick or injured birds and monkeys, a one-star review on Facebook. It was unnervingly easy to find strong and vociferous disapproval for fly fishing and its protagonists online.

To the popular FishUSA forum, where user AndyLee had provoked 223 responses to a post asking: Can somebody explain fly fisherman snobbery to me?

TastyTrout, listed as an ‘Expert Angler’, warned that “making that assumption opened up a whole can of worms”, which may or may not be true but which at the very least works as a deft fishing pun. “When I go bass fishing, guys using crank baits don’t look down on guys using soft plastic worms,” said Tasty. I don’t know what that means but it sounds like reasonable grounds for chagrin.”

Tension on the stream bank? You work all week, wake up in the dark to go and stand waist deep in cold water and instead of blissful tranquillity you’ve got some surly spinwheel rod fisher staring daggers at your back and kicking over your bait box when you aren’t looking. This was a useful negative; my case was gathering heft.

Apparently, fly-fisher people have derisory nicknames for non-fly fisher people, such as “bait floppers” or “worm drowners”. The plebs do have their comeback names, like “water slappers”, but they aren’t as clever or waspish. I’d rather be a water slapper than a worm drowner, wouldn’t you? (Again, it’s worth remembering that we don’t need to be either.)

D-Nymph closed the book on AndyLee’s question, with the following contribution: “Sure. It’s because we are smarter, better looking and wealthier than you. Our women are hotter too.” It will take some Pulitzer-level - though perhaps not Pulitzer worthy - research to determine the

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credibility of this claim but, if true, it would strike a serious blow to the naysayers.

Diving deeper, it became clear that what most fly-fishers liked least was other people “fishing their hole”, which seems entirely reasonable too. I can’t think of many things worse than having my hole fished.

The more I read, the clearer it became that even if you’re not a pretentious bigot already, fly fishing ensures that you will be accused of being one anyway. This surely comes from the idea that most hobbies are referred to as sports, or crafts, while fly fishing is offhandedly referred to as an art. This is obviously a misnomer, however loftily you speak of the act of throwing string into rivers. At the end of the day, it’s about catching fish. Calling this an art is as absurd as saying ‘The Art of Duck Hunting’, which is also a thing, and even quite a long book, the internet is quick to confirm.

There are, of course, many positives to counterbalance the downsides of taking all day to bother fish. There is the fresh air, the nature and the solitude, among other meditative advantages. But all of the good things about fly fishing can be accessed simply by going to the places fly fishers go and just standing there for a while. And if there is nothing obviously better to be said about fly fishing than standing alone in a mountain stream staring at the water - and there isn’t, because I searched the internet purely to find something to support this view and found it - then we have another reason not to do it.

It’s not just that fishing adds an extra hour to your preparations for standing in a river, it’s that the hour concerned is taken up pulling yourself into a sort of amphibian lederhosen and selecting very specific offcuts of dead animals on hooks. Foregoing all that malarkey, you could be at the river before everyone else and stand there quite happily, choosing the best part of the river to stand in and look at, unencumbered by the roughly 450 bits of non-negotiable fly fishing paraphernalia.

Small price to pay, you fly fishers might counter, and perhaps we could live with the obstructive practicalities if fly fishing didn’t also demonstrate the vanity and folly of the human spirit. I know, it’s unfortunate. I’ll explain

Like surfers, who conceitedly impose themselves on nature in order to acknowledge its power, fly-fisher people have to drag a variety of species out of their natural environments in order to feel connected to theirs. Like poking a beast with a stick, these humans can only respect nature when it gets up and bites them. A wave is not powerful until it has snapped your board in half; a river not beautiful until it is also challenging. The point is being missed, and badly. Waves were powerful and awe-inspiring before we started skiing down the face of them in big shorts; you can meditate without a fishing rod in your hand. In this way, fly-fisher people are like bungee jumpers; fretful adrenaline seekers with no inner stillness whatsoever, for whom only a

wildly active outside world can keep in tune with their own screaming inner disquiet.

Unsatisfied with simply going for a swim, for example, these addicts must not only catch and release (or occasionally kill) creatures inferior to themselves, they must wax lyrical about it at any given opportunity. Needing justification for these increasingly dubious claims, I returned to the internet to have the idea conformed. I found William G Tapply’s piece “The Truth About Fly-Fishermen”, in which he writes: “[The fly-fisher] thinks he’s the Ultimate Sportsman, and he fancies himself a poet. It’s all about the scent of clean air, the gurgle of rushing water, the symphony of birdsong, the fine art of casting, the craft of fly tying.”

He sounds like a bit of an arsehole. If only that was all.

Dull, superior and, let’s face it because I’ll probably find something online to corroborate this, probably neglectful of their families, fly-fishers are an anachronism in an age where adequate rejuvenation can take place in 12 minutes with the help of an hourglass meditation app. There’s no need to go wading around in rivers denying the future when technology has answered all of our prayers with the virtual reality fishing experience Pro Fishing Challenge VR for Oculus.

Think about it. By strapping a set of goggles to your head in your bedroom, you can quite easily spend half an hour fishing any river in the world and, provided you spend a little bit of actual money on a good virtual rod, which is in no way a waste of money, catch whatever you like, at will, in your tracksuit, without even having had to shower and brush your teeth. With this option dangling like a ripe pear at the bottom of the tree, it’s laughable to see people still grasping for the higher fruit.

“Is fly fishing a waste of time and money?” I asked Google, and came up with nothing before I had my suspicions confirmed by a 1-star Tripadvisor review of a fly fishing holiday from someone whom I’ve never met yet whose credibility I don’t at all question. In any case, the unimpeachably accurate search engine returned over five million results to that question, which I think represents an overwhelming affirmation that yes, fly fishing is indeed shit.

If you think that the internet alone cannot be used to verify my claims, then, in conclusion, we turn to a recent article in the Daily Telegraph - a fancy British newspaper that contains no lies because it is British and the British never lie - entitled ’10 Things No-one Tells You Before You Take Up Fishing’. All the classics are there. At number one, you’ve got,“Everything smells” before the list loses punch a bit, running out of ideas at number 7 with the irrelevant,“Carp isn’t the only coarse fish” but ending strongly with “once you’re hooked, other sports will be spoiled”.

I think that settles it. I don’t have to go fly fishing. Thank god for the internet.

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