Great message John, am commending this article to all recipients of our Club newsletter Fishtales for their reading and enjoyment.
Brian Coldwells
Lions Gate Anglers Club

The Insufferable Sport

  How did flyfishing become a way of life instead of a way of catching a few trout for supper?
  By itself, the fly rod is a perfectly reasonable implement. At the right time and place, with the right fly and the right presentation, it is capable of snaring more fish from a stream than a Japanese trawler can snare salmon from U.S. territorial waters. Once, the fly rod was nothing more than the humble, pragmatic, food-gathering tool of phlegmatic rustics like, say, John Barsness. Now, though, in the hands of greying boomers who wade into cold running water to soothe their jogged-out knees, it can no longer be just a simple pole for the catching of fish. Now, when it is raised majestically skyward and then waved down magically over a flowing stream, it is nothing less than the sceptre of some far and wondrous kingdom -- the Enchanted Wand of True Enlightenment.
  The fly rod, and flyfishing, descended into the realm of preposterousness and irrelevance along at least two routes. One can be traced back some 20 years to what is, in fact, a quite adequate story, A River Runs Through It, written, amazingly enough, by a college English teacher, Norman Maclean. The story's great sin, though, aside from letting Robert Redford loose on the world to direct yet another gormless cinematic travesty, is the jaw-dropping contention, made in its opening sentence, that there exists no clear distinction "between religion and fly fishing."
  One shudders even to speculate upon how many soulless masters of the universe this bit of wisdom has sent scuttling to trout streams. Flyfishing a sport? A pastime? Not hardly! It's theology, with swell gear to boot. It's a notion that in the last decades has granted flyfishing -- at one time just a way of enjoying simple pleasure -- the standing of a means of salvation from every spiritual, emotional, physical, pharmaceutical, and financial crisis imaginable. Especially financial, based on book sales, with far too many "fishers" (a large number now women as well as men) not satisfied merely to acknowledge flyfishing as their personal redeemer in the privacy of their own hearts, but insisting upon writing tome after tome about the entire ghastly conversion experience, so that none of us can escape sharing in the grim festivities.
  Although most such writings invariably turn out to be nothing more than self-absorbed, subliterate maunderings, the authors who compose them nonetheless seem to be laboring under the serious misconception that they are somehow Dante Alighieri commencing La divina commedia: "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost &when. Luckily I stumbled across an Orvis shop."
  Instead of Beatrice, these trovatore seem happier to have discovered the perfect wading shoe. No wonder your average Ivy League M.B.A. with a Mercedes sport-ute and a $500 graphite rod fancies himself a tortured poet whenever he shuffles into a creek in Patagonia or Kamchatka and performs a roll cast. It used to be that folks went to a river to fish. Now they go to perpetrate art and cleanse their psyches. Flyfishing for them is a matter of style over substance. Thus, they cleave with a zealot's fervor to such idiotic dogma as zero-weight rods and the "immorality" (some Imperial Wizard of flyfishing once actually said this to the painter Russell Chatham) of
sinking lines! And there isn't one in 10 of them who could tell you what the original purpose of flyfishing indeed was. Bluntly put, a fly rod was, and is (or ought to be), for killing gamefish. Yet flyfishing's other road to hell was paved three generations ago when angling bodhisattva Lee Wulff decreed, "A gamefish is too valuable to be caught only once." This is truly sophistry of a very high order. Too valuable to whom? Tackle manufacturers, fishing guides, lodges? So valuable that they deserve to be put in abject terror of their lives over and over again? And at which time they are caught is it permissible to kill them? When they qualify as a "trophy" for some vacationing dry-fly sportsman, but not when they might represent fresh fish to supplement the diet of a less well-heeled angler, who might or might not be proficient with a fly rod?
  Wulff's statement is not so much a conservation stance (although I'm sure that's what he intended it to be) as it is an admission of flyfishing's degeneracy, even 60 years ago. Such affected manners are the mark not just of an everyday elitism, but one that is positively mandarin. (A few years ago, I happened upon a letter to the editor from some nitwit orthodontist railing against the severe scarring he was seeing on the mandibles of the trout he was landing with his fly rod. The good doctor's solution was to set the possession limit at zero and banish all bait and lure fishermen from the river -- the poor man so divorced from reality that he did not realize that no self-respecting bait or lure fisherman ever put a legal trout back into a river so it could develop a scar!)
  It would seem that gamefish, especially trout, are special creatures, meant to be fished only by very special people. Why? Because they are so handsome and intelligent (the trout, not the anglers). Excuse me:
They're fish. And if their designation as "game" constrains flyfishermen from killing and eating them, why not the same constraints upon killing and eating game animals?
  What is it the high-dollar angler at the high-dollar wilderness lodge does directly after a self-satisfying day of torturing and releasing wild trout (not a few of which will shortly expire due to gross mishandling)? He repairs to the open-beamed dining room and tucks into a hearty, candlelit meal of wild ptarmigan or wild caribou, complemented by a nice Chianti, of course.
  Formerly the province of "deadbeats" with a taste for the occasional trout supper, flyfishing now threatens to turn into the outdoor equivalent of the power lunch. Devoid of almost any reference to its original honorable purpose of finding, catching, killing, and eating wild flesh, flyfishing today is a sad melange of faux mysticism, sanctimony, fashion trends, networking, and a poetic sense about as sophisticated as that found in high-school literary magazines entitled The Zephyr. It is unmoored. None dare call it "blood sport."
  Give a man a fish, they say, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

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