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Thanks to giant trawlers doing all the heavy lifting for us, fishing has gone from a necessity to a hobby and sport. It’s a great way to get away from it all and enjoy the quiet, before your line starts to tug. But true anglers will tell you that the real fun is derived from outsmarting the prey in its own habitat.

Fish aren’t stupid. Those tens of thousands of years of being hunted have taught them to differentiate a genuine meal ticket from a dead worm on a hook. And, as their survival instincts sharpened, so have man’s level of deceit.

Anglers who use bait spend a great deal of time studying what the fish they want to catch eat. Fly-fishers must learn the exacting art of casting their lines to make the feathery lures look like real “flies”, often on the surface of the water. And plastic lures, which happen to be the most popular choice here, rely on its design and the skill of the angler to move like a living thing.

These often absurdly coloured, googly eyed plastic fish are anything but toys, though. Each has been specifically shaped and weighted so that they can cut through or catch water in a specific way – allowing them to twist, dance, dart or jig through currents like real fish. While there are lures that require minimal effort to work, there are many more that require deft rod skills. There is, for instance, a type of lure with ball bearings in the body, which not only allow it to be cast farther, but also maintain the lure’s depth in a water column when the rod is jerked. These ball bearings also rattle to attract predatory fish. In fact, ticking off territorial species of fish is one reason why some lures look more like an artist’s impression of an acid trip than anything on God’s green earth.

You’d think the fish have pretty much no chance now, but it will still take years of experience and more reading beyond these four pages, before you can expertly utilise these tools. Either that, or you can wait until science finds a way to make fish jump straight into our waiting nets, but what fun would that be?