When I was a child, I was really fascinated by my father fishing tackle box. It appeared to me that he had the most magnificent and varied fishing supplies imaginable. He could trick any fish there was with his fishing tackle, or so I thought. He had a lot of 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 wasn’t just a matter of quality, but of pride.
It appears like, with the rapid advance of fishing equipments, a lot of the sport has been taken out of it these days. I spent some time on a fishing trip with a good friend of mine, a fairly wealthy individual who owns his own motor yacht. He actually has a weather radar gear, a GPS fishfinder, and a lot of sort of sophisticated equipment to find the schools of fish. With him, finding fish is not an art anymore. t is not a matter of instincts, of sport or luck. It is just a matter of cold hard science - following the instructions 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 told me it was simply a matter of him owning more sophisticated fishing supplies than my father did. He said that had they offered GPS fishfinders in fly fishing shops in my father’s day, everybody would have purchased them. They wouldn’t have lost time with hand tying their own fishing lures if they could instantly identify where to get the fish. I see things differently, however.
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