When you surf as many fly fishing-related news items as I do, you start to recognize certain trends.

Let’s make that “certain distressing trends.”

I see a lot of “mainstream media” fly fishing stories every day. Sadly, they often fall into one of three categories, which I’ve neatly packaged for you right here (which is another symptom of media involvement):

  • The Clueless “Never-Been-Fishing-But-Trying-to-be-Hip” Writer
  • The Shouldn’t-be-Clueless Outdoor Writer (but is)
  • The Clueless Writer as Schill

Clearly, the biggest abusers of fly fishing are the reporters who have never fly fished before.

They smother us with pointless observation and wide-of-the-mark “insight” in an attempt to prove they “got it,” which of course they didn’t.

Worst case scenario? Their inexperience offers the them license to go all “gonzo” on fly fishing. The results are almost always unpretty; witness this little gem from the Casper Star-Tribune.

When I found out I’d be going to Saratoga, I decided it was time I learn how to fly fish. So I asked Mike “Hack” Patterson, of Hack’s Tackle and Outfitters in Saratoga, to teach me. He did, and I think he did a good job — but I’ll save my bragging for later. Besides, I learned a lot more about fly fishing than how to boast.

Fishing is a technical, number driven sport. I see this when I step into a tackle shop full of different kinds of flies, different sizes of leaders, different poles in different weights.

Numbers guide fishermen’s choices: Are fish biting the larger number 14 Royal Wulff or the smaller number 18 Para Adams?

What is a Wulff, I wonder, as I poke around in the fly bins.

Numbers quantify fishermen’s success: Look at my 22-inch brown trout. It’s a beauty. To me, it looks bloody.

But I discovered, in fishing, numbers are bragging rights and technical knowledge is power.

“Technical knowledge is power??”

Fishing is a “number driven sport??”

It gets worse. Later, she refers to trout of breeding size as “brew trout,” and… the list goes on, but I grow bored just typing this.

It’s possible these articles serve a useful purpose by recruiting new fishing into the sport, but it’s akin to recruiting teenagers into the army by promising them an all-expenses-paid vacation to a warm location.

False pretenses are bad, no matter what the situation.

What’s Worse.

Worse are the stories from those who should know better, but don’t seem to.

Today’s example comes courtesy the Sacramento Bee — a “fly fishing is peaceful” story written by a freelancer who is supposed to be an editor of Western Outdoor News.

You’d think an editor would know that “Richard Allen” isn’t the editor of California Fly Fisher (Richard Anderson edits and publishes the regional magazine that employs many of the best writers in the business).

Then there are the countless stories — many of them found in mainstream fly fishing magazines — where an “expert” tosses off a “fact” that makes at least a few of us wince.

Wincing is bad, and it’s probably the result of a writer moving too far outside their “zone of competence.”

For example, paying good money to read an article I wrote about indicator nymphing places you among the elite group referenced by the infamous ”there’s one born every minute” quote.

Worse Than That.

Worse even are the stories written about fly fishing where neither the writer nor the people involved seem to know what the hell they’re talking about.

Often, fly fishing serves only as a backdrop or “trend” in these articles instead of a passion, and result in stories like this earlier-referenced abomination from the Toronto Star:

Exchanging a business suit for a pair of hip waders may seem like a stretch, but corporate executives are falling for fly-fishing – hook, line and sinker.

For Scott Wilson and his colleagues, it was a different sort of team-building exercise that focused on learning new skills and building camaraderie.

“No one had been fly-fishing before so it was something different for all of us. And nobody mastered it in one day, but we had a good time and we learned from each other.”

Ahh, fly fishing as corporate team-building trend.

It turns out the story was nothing more than advertising for an outfitter (disguised as actual editorial content — worth a whole post of its own), but then, there’s no shortage of that in the mainstream and fly fishing media too.

In the end, you read the words and take your chances. Any Underground examples of media-fuelled atrocities committed upon fly fishing as a whole?

[tags]fly fishing, fishing, writing, fly fishing magazines, mainstream media[/tags] 

Posted in Opinion.