Back to the Dark Side?

Next subject in this “back to” series is the Dark Side 🙂

Just my way of using the great Start War’s saga analogy towards the fishing. There is no good or bad in fishing it is just fishing…or is it?

Different styles of fishing? Or just different approaches? Or maybe fly fishing is the real fishing and everything else is a joke, or for that matter any other style of fishing.

We could probably open this philosophical subject and talk about it in a few hundreds of pages… and not even get close to the end. But maybe we can put it out a bit more simple. I believe it’s about people!

After so many years I’ve spent fishing, I’ve been lucky enough to experience many fishing styles and meet lots of people passionate about it. But no matter in what fishing group(style) you are going to be, you’ll feel this strong belief within the people that this is the REAL thing, this is the BEST fishing style, this is the ONLY style that is for real. And you might feel that too. I know I was.

What I am talking about here?

Let’s take for example carp fishing. Ask anyone in North America about carp fishing and in 99.9% of the cases you’ll get a grim answer that reflects a stomach-turning feeling. Meanwhile in the UK, Europe and rest of the world carp is the top game fish. In fact they have huge carp tournaments like the bass tournaments in NA.

Fact is that most of the people against carp fishing never even caught one, at least not by intention. Carp is a really strong fish, not super easy to catch.

Then why this attitude?

…

But there is more… let’s take conventional fishing and fly fishing.

Many of the conventional fishing guys think that the fly fishermen are arrogant, elitist people. On the other side the fly fishermen think that the conventional fishing guys are just some beginners and they don’t know what real fishing is and don’t really understand it .

So what is better??

Left or Right?

What about jigging?

I can already feel the rage… “Oh but euro-nymphing is NOT jigging!” Or “how can you even compare a plastic with a fly?” 🙂

Okay, let’s take a look at the surface lures:

“Oau! You can’t even compare them!”Yes you can 🙂

I think we are the ones creating all these barriers. Somehow the humans like to put names and tags to everything…this is white this is black…this is good this is bad…these are cool these are not.

While in reality there are indeed differences and guidelines that help us to be civilized, help us to be kinder and pursue the greater good… in fishing I believe it is more simple. It is the time we spend TOGETHER. It is the joy of battling the elements. The smile landing a good catch or sitting around a fire sharing a shore lunch.

These simple things are making us happy, everything else are just illusions and mind barriers we are imposing to ourselves.