A Long Absence

I, like many other modern-age fly fishermen, am a twitter addict. I don’t even tweet that much, I just feel that I use it quite a bit to keep up with what’s going on in the scene, more so than the once popular Facebook and the numerous and not-so-different others. I recently (today, actually) read a tweet that seemed to evoke quite the response from me, sort of made me think. It essentially said, “I think that too many folks are looking at fly fishing as a competition.” It was sort of an epiphany for me, as it sort of summed up a lot of my thoughts about the recent fly fishing comminuty as a whole. It’s part of the reason I sort of withdrawed from it for a spell, but I am slowly coming back into what I was a part of.

I have a lot of people ask me why I quit fly fishing. In reality, I never really “Quit”, I just sort of got frustrated with it. I did the same with bass fishing. I always thought bass fishing was way too overly dramatic and competitive for me, like everything was a race to prove that one was better than you. Fly fishing, sadly enough, seems to be exactly that as well, and there really are some people that are turning it into a sort of arms race of who can be superior and more competitive than their “opponent”. I do realize and see that there are a lot of honest folks in both sports, most notably fly fishing, that don’t partake in this style, but it’s the few that are turning fishing into a numbers game that are putting people off it. I see too often on the numerous forums people proclaiming their triumphs with their personal bests listed in bold and italicized to represent importance, or people making posts with such titles as “I caught 75 bass today!!!”-Oh you’re so cool, I want to be like you- that’s not the immediate impression I get. It’s not a numbers game, fishing is about getting out and doing what you like while enjoying the beautiful places that fishing is synonymous with, without the competition and the bickering that comes with this behavior. I don’t really understand why these tightly wound personalities are creating this image in the sport, but it really gets under my skin to say the least. To each their own I guess, just the constant bragging and competing started to get to me.

This may sound like a complete rant, and that’s of course exactly what it is, but I felt compelled to put it into prose for one reason or another. I guess you could consider this my welcoming back into the fly fishing blogosphere.