Go Fishing
theweek.com
theweek.com
If you're interested, there are some great youtube resources for learning how to fish. I'm a bass fisherman so I'd recommend looking for videos and articles from bassresource, tacitcal bassin, and flukemaster. For anyone interested, bass fishing is a much more active form of fishing than most people imagine fishing to be. You're actively casting and retrieving rather than tossing a line into the water and waiting. Here's a video of a really great good ole Alabama boy doing some topwater bass fishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvP0GBBiaLg
Edit: I live in New Jersey about 10 miles outside of New York City and fish for bass nearly every weekend. I've caught bass in Central Park before. There are fish in nearly every park pond across the country.
I remember fishing as a kid, my dad would be bait fishing while I lure fished because bait was super boring.
Hunting is a bit different in NZ to the USA, you tend to walk the whole day, stopping at points to look with your binoculars, rather than sitting in a tree all day waiting for animals to walk by.
Every hunter I've met when out has been happy to give tips on where they've seen animals or sign, and to give tips or suggestions on where to go.
Of course, everyone has their "spot X" that they won't give up, but apart from that they're happy to share their knowledge and stories, especially when out in the field.
My surfing experience is a bit limited, but barring a few wannabee edgy teens "friendly, welcoming and uncompetitive" very much describes my experience with skaters everywhere.
And yet I can't get myself to do it as an adult, even though I have two young children who I know would love it. It's with very mixed emotion that I decide not to go. My social circle finds fishing repugnant, and while that's a factor, I could just do it and not tell them. But there is also the aspect of hooking a fish and dragging it in for sport. I eat meat and don't even find the act of fishing particular offensive, but I guess I do have some buddhist sentiments lurking in the back of my mind. It seems that if I wish to harvest fish I should do so in the quickest and least painful way, and not as a sport. I do wish I did not have this lingering concern as I would love to go fishing without guilt.
I do not take offense to anyone else fishing for sport, so forgive me if my comment sounds judgmental, as that is not my intent.
And if fiddling with sails is not your thing, or your area has only rivers but no lakes, canoeing can be very relaxing too. Today you can buy light but sturdy inflatable canoes made from hi-tech drop-stitch material that take just 10mins to deploy.
Of course, even when the risks are minimal, always think about safety - life vests etc., especially in case you take children with you.
But ethically I just can't do it.
I don't want to sound judgmental either, but I'd encourage anyone who feels this way and is still eating other animals to reconsider their positions.
If your kids don’t enjoy eating grilled trout, try raising chickens for eggs :)
I never thought much about fishing until the day I had a large catfish flopping around on my kitchen floor (catfish live quite a while out of water). Having been mainly a catch & release type, this would be the first fish I ate in quite a while and I was acutely aware (obviously) that I had to kill a live animal before I could eat it. So I said a short prayer to the fish gods and plunged a knife into its brain and it died instantly.
Tasted pretty good.
Fast forward two decades or so later. Neighbor dogs broke into my chicken coop and killed most of the flock. Now I have a handful of bloody chickens lying around slowly dying. The only humane thing to do is to kill them quickly. So grab each one carefully, quickly snap its neck and it's dead.
Although one of the situations was clearly not initiated by me, the feeling I had in both cases was essentially the same: regret, but that's how life goes sometimes.
Just apply Aloe vera in the damaged parts, feed well, keep it warm in a calm place isolated from other chicken and wait. They will benefit also if you allow them eat the remaining chunks of aloe (only the transparent gel, not the bitter green parts).
He does an amazing job of making the reader “feel” what it feels like to fish. Fishing is all about how it makes you feel (IMO). It’s less about the technical aspects of rods and equipment and strategy (as it might seem to a non fisherman, since fishermen tak about this stuff incessantly) more about a state of mind that no other activity can emulate.
I read it as a teenager.
Googled it now because of your comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea
Only now did I get to know this about it - from the Wikipedia article:
[ The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952.[1] It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.[2]
In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.[2] ]
You would not bother any fish, and you would derive as much enjoyment.
(I am not into fishing so I may be missing something)
Fast-forward several years and I don't fish much now. Last Fall I took two of my kids up to Central Oregon to camp for a week and watch the solar eclipse. I had never taken them fishing as I figured they'd hate it in this age of instant gratification mobile devices. Nonetheless I decided to drive to Walmart, buy some gear and spend half a day fishing in the river.
We did. They loved it, proclaiming "Dad this is so fun. Why have you never taken us fishing before?!"
We didn't even catch anything.
- Papa, and every grandfather, ever.
Too bad the bay area doesn't have great fishing. You gotta go up to the delta / clear lake. Palo Alto even has a "Palo Alto resident only" lake.
Deep-sea/surf/pier/lake/pond/river/stream fishing each have their unique challenges. Also contrary to popular belief some styles / quarry don't require extreme patience.
Fishing is one of the cruelest things I can imagine doing to an animal. The closest way I can put it to a human is... imagine thinking you're about to bite into an apple and then being yanked, naked, into outer space by a metal hook through your face.
It's significantly more cruel than instantly ending the life of a cow or chicken, even if you catch and release. Just go sit in a boat and do drugs or something.
At first, the hook wasn't too deep into my flesh, but the pike kept wriggling, and within seconds it came out the other side of my thumb, right through the thumbnail. I don't think I've ever felt such pain at that age. I was bleeding all over the grass, crying and panicking with this slowly dying fish attached to my hand. Reluctantly, but knowing I had to do so, I found a dagger in my tackle box and cut off the fish's head. It didn't go well and the creature died a horrible death as I cut its head off with my weak left hand, trying to ignore the pain in my right. But it was finally dead.
My hand started hurting a lot. So much, in fact, that I couldn't pack up my things and ride my bike back home, so I sat down hoping that someone would come by to help me out. The pike's head still dangled from my thumb. Eventually a kid about my own age saw me (crying my eyes out) and his mother drove me home. A few hours later, I was in the doctor's office and with some local anesthetic, he cut the barbed part of the hook off and slid the rest of it out the way it entered. He thought the whole situation was kind of funny.
The kid's mom who had driven me back home had wrapped up the pike in a newspaper and given it to my parents who promptly threw it in the garbage since it was covered in my blood and badly mangled from my botched up knife work.
I didn't fish again until two years ago (I was 32) when I thought I'd try it again for old times' sake. I caught a fish pretty early on. It was a tiny little bass with this enormous hook of my lure poking through its upper lip. I felt like crap. If this creature felt the way that I must have felt, I couldn't continue fishing. I sold my gear on Craigslist for cheap just to get it out the house and said goodbye to it forever.
The practice of taking lives for pastime doesn't sit well with my ethical beliefs for two reasons: the first is empathy for another creature, and the other is I'm uncomfortable with destroying something so complex for no real benefit to me. It's like a child destroying sand castles others have built, amplified thousand times.
Sounds more like first world problems.
That's nonsensical, really. It's not equivalent.
Fish don't wear clothes and they don't think the same way humans do. So they're not thinking, "Yikes, I was about to eat - while naked oddly enough - but now I'm being yanked into space".
Also hooks don't damage a fish mouth like it would a human mouth. Fish don't even bleed from getting caught, usually. That's how different it is. There are exceptions of course, they can get damaged or even killed with an unlucky hook, but in the case of a human it'd be exceptional if they didn't incur significant damage (both physically and mentally). So trying to say the experience would be that similar is pretty silly.
> It's significantly more cruel than instantly ending the life of a cow or chicken, even if you catch and release.
You mean the cows and chickens that often live their entire lives inside buildings squished together, in cages, standing in their waste, pumped up with drugs, etc?
I'd say that's much more cruel. I'd rather be a fish than a cow or chicken.
And: >Researchers from Queen's University, in Belfast, have proven that when fish are subjected to pain stimuli, the signals by no means simply ebb away in the spinal cord. Scientists have discovered sensitive skin areas directly behind the gill covers of goldfish and trout. Using implanted electrodes, they have been able to show that the nerve cells located there send signals directly to the fish's brain. When researchers poked the animals with needles, a flurry of neuron messages were transmitted to the endbrain -- the very region of the brain where pain signals are also processed by birds and mammals.
Your entertainment, should not come at the expense of another sentient being's suffering.
I've actually created several pieces of fishing software, for personal use, such as a journal/logging app for recording outings (locations, conditions, results, etc.), a crawler/scraper that extracts EXIF location info for good fishing spots, a notifications app for ideal fishing conditions, etc.
However, The Compleat Angler is a different kind of fishing, and what the author of the linked piece is alluding to is a little harder to come by these days.
I live < 5 minutes from the Thames. I'm about 30 minutes walk from Teddington Lock where the Thames stops/starts becoming tidal. This area was once inhabited by Alexander Pope and he referred to it as "Arcadia". There is a corner in the river near me, the view of which from a hill on the opposite bank is protected by an act of Parliament to this day.
I have never seen somebody fishing down there. What's more, it's way too busy to be able to catch fish or enjoy the solitary lifestyle an angler might be hoping for.
I'd love to know why anglers avoid it. I'd love to know where they go instead. As a man about to turn 40, perhaps I would like to learn to fish myself, and spend the odd weekend or even mid-week day (yay for flexible working), sat next to the water, quietly awaiting a fish.
Fishing taught me many valuable lessons in my childhood and youth. I remember countless hours of fixing my rod after casting into a tree, days without even having something nibbeling when all you want is finally catching a fish and of course loosing a fish right before you get it out of the water (some of these memories are still painful today). But all that didn't matter when you finally caught that huge beast.
Early on I learned the value of patience and delayed satisfaction, how to manage anger and defeats, and using trial and error to solve problems (not catching enough fish). It also gave me a perspective on what it really means to eat animals. When you kill and evicerate your first catch, meat stops being something you just buy at the super market.
I have tried fishing a few times, and found that it isn't for me. I'm extremely bad at it. The whole setup is very clumsy and difficult to transport by anything but a car, and it's all quite boring. If the point is sitting on a chair in nature while reading or having a beer then fine, but fishing doesn't look like a useful addition to that kind of setup.
Also I don't enjoy the idea of hurting wildlife (I'm not a vegetarian but kind of wish I would be).
I first read about this in Abercrombie's First Law trilogy, about Logen Ninefingers (not a fishing accident).
0) http://www.cracked.com/article_19236_6-tricks-that-let-you-c... [#5]
Yoga or meditation could? (in a quiet area with water if you like)
I guess this is difficult to totally order set of possible activities by their goodness. Activities each have their strengths. But I'm uncomfortable with qualifying an activity that involves purposefully hurting or killing living beings good. There must be better ways to spend one's life.
Instead of catching fishes, start catching ideas! Write, paint or draw near a lake! :-)
It isn't about fishing, we ain't been fishing for years now. Old Neville over there, he's never been fishing. It's about telling the tales. You got to set the scene, spin the yarn. That's what fishing's about.
Hiking along that water - that can be wonderful. Just leave the fishing pole to people who care.
I would highly recommend Kirk Lombard's "The Sea Forager's Guide to the Northern California Coast" It details a lot of the species of fish around the bay area, and also non fish species that are foraged like clams and seaweed.
Here's a summary of regulations for the Coastal waters of the Bay Area https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Fishing/Ocean/Regulations/Fishin...
Kirk also does tours, sells what he catches and has an entertaining youtube channel.
That's a pretty unkind way to frame it.
If you're getting bored, might try a moving to a new spot or switching lures. Sometimes it takes some experimentation and luck to figure out the magic. There's one place I like to go that is super slow and boring, unless there's a thunderstorm moving in. Things pick up quickly then.
If you have a strong opinion about eating or not eating fish or meat harvested in one fashion or another, that also is a matter of taste. You and everyone around you will be happier from the moment you accept that.
So it stands to reason that all of these "tastes" exist on a spectrum from morally repugnant to the Buddhist practice of refusing to kill anything. And while we all draw our own line on that spectrum between what we consider acceptable and unacceptable, society will also draw that line and consider some of those activities to be illegal.