So why do we fish? First there is the joy of being out on the water or in the surf. Then there is the excitement when we actually catch a fish. These are the obvious answers to the question, but they don’t get at the heart of the matter, or examine the compulsion.
For me, fishing is about focus. I am locked into the hunt, the presentation and the expectation that at any moment I’m going to be battling the biggest fish of my life. This single-minded focus alters the normal passage of time. When the fishing is good, time passes by at warp speed and when it’s slow time crawls, but I’m still concentrating on how to find the fish. More importantly, at least for me anyway, fishing is one of the few pastimes where I’m in the moment, and no outside thoughts enter my head. I’m either thinking about how we can catch more fish or trying to figure out why we aren’t catching any. Every time my lure comes back to the boat, my brain is considering the next cast. And that’s a good thing, because there is no room for the problems of daily life to enter my head.
I also think it’s coded in the DNA of some of us more strongly than others—that age-old need to be a hunter-gatherer. Sure, I could buy a fish at the grocery store for far less money and in far less time than I can prowling the ocean. But that feeling of accomplishment wouldn’t be there. Even though an angler like me spends a ton of money on the sport, when I bring a fish home for dinner, I have it in my head I found it and caught it for free, and therefore I’m a wonderful provider. The closest comparable hobby to this is vegetable gardening. Time flies doing garden work, and the pride of growing your own food knows no bounds. And don’t even try to make the comparison between fishing and golf. Okay, both involve swearing, but I’ve never seen a fisherman toss a rod in frustration, yet how many times have you seen a golfer throw a club to the ground? I’ll bet the answer is “many times.” Which means you have watched me attempt to golf. Also, I defy anyone to serve golf balls to their family for dinner.
My style of fishing is not, I repeat is not, relaxing. You might have an image in your head of a man smoking a pipe, sitting comfortably, waiting for a fish to find his bait. I’ve tried that, and I can’t do it. First of all, I only use bait as a last resort, and second I’m fidgeting the whole time. So bait fishing is not my cup of tea. Instead, I need to be doing, and that means casting in all directions to cover as much water as possible or taking over the wheel of my friend Adam’s boat and going hunting for birds diving on bait fish driven up by stripers.
Don’t misunderstand my lack of relaxation as impatience. I can be the most patient guy in the world if I believe that sooner or later I will find fish. This probably comes from my days of trout fishing on rivers, where in the course of a day I might easily cover four or five miles of a river, wanting to see what’s around the bend, always believing a beautiful brown or rainbow trout is waiting for me if I just push on a little farther.
Likewise, I will stay out on the boat from dawn until last light, hunting for fish, totally invigorated by the environment. I never feel tired when fishing, whereas at home I take a nap most days about 2 p.m. Although I’m not tranquil when fishing, I find being outdoors energizing. Emerson said it best: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”
All true, but more so if there are fish around.
Just because I’m not relaxed when I fish, doesn’t mean the sport doesn’t yield healthy benefits for both body and mind. The word I would use for my mindset when fishing is engaged. And in this modern world with a distraction every minute, the simple act of trying to find a fish becomes, well, all important. Sure, in the scheme of one’s life it means little compared to family, friends and work, but while you are fishing, the search and the setting become your world. And a trip is enhanced, as it sometimes has been for me, by seeing something unusual, such as an ocean sunfish, a basking shark, a spiraling pod of dogfish, a breaching whale, an unusual cloud formation or pelagic birds on the ocean in the fall.
Unfortunately, a near miss—when a striper goes for my lure and I yank it out of its mouth in excitement—will cause me to go apoplectic. My friend Adam once brought his friend Mark on the boat with us, and after Mark witnessed such an incident I heard him say to Adam, “Does he always swear like this?”
“Not always,” Adam answered. “I’ve seen him cry like a two-year-old when he misses a really big fish.”
This is an excerpt from “The Power of Positive Fishing: A Story of Friendship and the Quest for Happiness.” It’s available at www.michaeltougias.com
This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue.
