Hey, Ashley – tell me why you love fishing.
The question on everyone’s lips I’m led to believe is ‘why do I go fishing?’ The honest answer is ‘I don’t know’, I’ve never stopped to think about it. It’s something I’ve always done from a small boy and assumed it was a natural Father/Son type scenario, but let’s break it down. I thought about the easy get out clause, the mountaineers who cite their reason for climbing Everest as ‘because it’s there’. Now that I’m forced to delve into the deepest darkest parts of my mind, I believe I can shed a little light on the matter. From as far back as I can remember, my Father was a staunch sea angler, with his own boats, and donned the stereotypical attire inclusive of the big knitted jumper, woolly bobble hat and wellies. Sea angling naturally culminated in bags of dead fish in the kitchen and trophy shots of lifeless specimens. It is here that I think the first of my distinctions can be made. I hated the killing of fish and would run around the boat trying to revive the multitude of deceased Mackerel that lay strewn about the deck, having met their grizzly end in such unceremonious circumstances. I vividly remember my Father making me hold an orange Tupperware bowl with a lid on encasing a flat fish of some sort which flapped occasionally in defiance of its inevitable end. To this day I don’t eat fish of any kind and still find the sea fishing ethic very hard to stomach.
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