Cellphone and the great outdoors

AS OF TODAY, WE no longer have a phone line in our home. We also no longer refer to our pants as britches.

This progress is, in no small part, due to me entering, kicking and screaming, into this decade by finally accepting that I need an iPhone 6S more than the very air I breathe. And also because no one in my house would recognize britches as a word.

I won’t lie to you; it was a struggle for me to embrace the idea of a smartphone after spending so many years with my old dumbphone.

It is not because I am opposed to new technology, either. No, it is because a smartphone is one of those things that can ruin a perfectly good fishing story.

You see, in the old days, long before the advent of these devil machines, you would simply go fishing, catch and release a 10-inch trout, then go home and – an angler’s memory being what it is – phone to tell your friend about the 20inch trout you caught.

Back then, no one had smartphones and their ever-present camera, so your friends had no way of verifying the truth. There-

fore, they would congratulate you and, while they were at it, tell you about a 22-inch trout whose veracity you could not verify either. In turn, you would regale them with tales of an even larger imaginary fish you caught last week. Over the course of several years, both parties would have developed a great mythology that included happily claiming that the average weight of the brook trout they caught in a local stream was between 9 and 13 pounds. And, because, no one but a blowhard would dare carry a camera while fishing or hunting, you merely accepted the other guy’s story as plausible.

These days, and I blame this entirely on the technology, everyone wants you to text or email them the photo of the fish or game immediately. Worse still, most of my buddies would like one photo of the fish in question beside today’s newspaper so that they can verify the date.

Fail to take a photo of any fish you have bested and your claims are immediately suspect.

If this continues I expect to see some anglers taking selfies with expensive rainbow trout from the frozen fish section of the grocery store. All we need to do is develop an app that helps you walk into the place unnoticed with fishing rod, vest and waders. By the way, if you do this, don’t forget to crop out the lobster tank in the background.

The point is I’m going to have to be a lot more honest about the size of the fish I catch on any given day.

There’s one other thing that makes these cell phones dangerous for anglers too. They can give away your spot. Last year, for example, a friend and I found a new, productive pool on a stretch of river we have never fished fish solely from information we gleaned from a photo that someone posted.

That’s why I plan on being very careful about where I take my photos with this phone.

For instance, I won’t be taking any in the local stream I fish.

Call me selfish, but I don’t want anyone else to figure out where all those 9- to-13-pound brook trout are …