Catch at sea not on the web
Why you should hone your skills on the water
Don’t get sucked in by Internet trolls.
T he reality of much of today’s life is that most of it can be found online. The Internet has created instant gratification to unprecedented levels – watch an entire series immediately, get the answer to a question, find and buy products – and angling has not been able to escape.
Type in a query and chances are you’ll have an answer. It might not necessarily be the right answer, but you’ll have it in seconds. With this proliferation of instant information, an increasing amount of anglers are looking for a quick fix and instant results, particularly newcomers to the sp.
Google Maps, weather apps and a host of fishing pages have taken a lot of the legwork out of fishing, and many anglers now prefer to log on than put the hours in themselves. What the newcomer to the sport can miss out on is the formative process that most of us went through as youngsters – hours spent on the local pier and river catching tiddlers but learning something new every single time we went out.
Angling, and the pleasure derived from it, is purely a personal thing. I’m not in favour of taking shortcuts, and I believe that all the time spent on the groundwork is what makes us better anglers. You can’t learn watercraft from a screen; an mp3 file can’t teach you how to select appropriate bait, and a GIF won’t explain how to cast. The best teacher for any of these tasks is experience, not YouTube.
EXPLORE
I accept that spare time can come at a premium, but making the effort to explore and discover angling is best done from the water’s edge, not the edge of an office chair.
I have grave reservations about angling forums and interactive pages on Facebook. Some of the people and advice you encounter are beyond helpful, while others are just plain abusive. I have recently been advising people to stay away from fishing forums, particularly newcomers. I have been the victim of an orchestrated bullying campaign, where a small group didn’t like someone disagreeing with them. Their actions were petty and really put the sport back a couple of years in Ireland.
This is an environment where ‘grown men’ create multiple online personas to back themselves up in arguments and vote out suggestions and policies that don’t suit their ideals. This is a world where it is acceptable for people to criticise others, knowing they are safe behind the anonymity of online pseudonyms. A strange place indeed.
RESOURCES
It is the Facebook pages and public angling resources that display the trolls in all their glory. A recent case was the capture of a potential UK record fish where the treatment of the captor was vile. Not only did the abusers post threats, many others let them do it probably fearing being picked on themselves. Silence suggests consent.
It is suggested that many of those spewing bile online get out fishing only once or twice a year, and spend their time on the web. Newcomers to the sport can find it difficult to tell the difference between a genuine angler and an armchair waffler when it comes to Internet sites.
Angling is a rewarding sport that gets you out into the open and allows you to enjoy the sights, sounds, smells and wonder of the countryside and coastline.
Get out there and find your own path and don’t get distracted by the online trolls and fools. You’ll never catch anything looking at a computer screen at home.