Has fishing become too easy?
Unless you only want to catch fish for food, angling only has any point
to it when you use methods that entail at least a modicum of difficulty
and skill.
If we merely wanted to catch fish irrespective of the method we could,
after all, drain the water off, or net the fish out or, heaven forbid,
poison them.
I have mentioned that obvious fact because, having fished a lot for a
great many years, I am starting to wonder whether we anglers have gone
just a bit to far in making it easy to catch great weights of fish.
I have caught big catches of both trout and coarse fish on odd occasions
in the past when conditions were such as to make this possible.
On normal fishing days until quite recently huge weights of fish were
not caught very often.
In my competitive fishing days I took part in many a fishing match when
I, or some other competitor, won top prize with a total weight of say
four pounds of fish, and sometimes a lot less than that.
Now the various publications that are devoted to angling often describe
fishing matches in which the winner had well over 100lbs of fish and occasionally
twice that weight.
I do not pour scorn on the anglers who regularly catch huge weights of
fish. They use skill and determination and accept that angling can be
like that now on many of our commercial fisheries.
I think that we should be honest about it though and understand that such
huge catches in a competitive event of only a few hours fishing at what
we once considered the worst part of the fishing day can only be taken
because many waters are greatly overstocked with fish.
In a state of nature such numbers of fish would become diseased or starved
to death, but the density of fish that we have now on some venues can
only survive and thrive and keep taking anglers baits because they rely
on foodstuff that the many anglers who fish day-by-day throw in as free
food that we call groundbait.
Having once become accustomed to regularly catching several fair-sized
fish with few blank days we are reluctant to go to fisheries that do not
overstock.
I do wonder whether the knowledge that in a typical commercial stillwater
very nearly every fish has been caught and put back at least once, sometimes
many times, is not making the sport rather artificial.