WHY ANGLERS HATE OTHER ANGLERS

My thoughts on the internal hate that surrounds various fishing niches

I am politically apathetic in most things of the world. I miss the 90s and before, when it was so faux pas for anyone to tell you their political beliefs or even who they were voting for, that you didn’t dare ask or discuss it for fear of being utterly rude. Unfortunately today, the modern political mindset, which is nothing more than “we hate the other team,” is carrying over into every non-political activity including things like fishing. And it has me questioning things like: why do anglers hate other anglers so much?

I’ve not seen a time in my 20-plus years of working full-time in the recreational fishing industry that there has been so much hate around something as wholesome as fishing from other fishermen. Go to any post on Bassmaster’s social media. Doesn’t matter what the topic is. There will be several folks hating on something, usually unrelated to the post, because people feel a burning desire to tear down anything they don’t like in this political climate.

I really fail to understand why people feel that way about anything. I get that some are against modern technology, and thus seek to rail on every fishing post that mentions or shows the slightest glimpse of it as they watch their political leaning news channel on their streaming media service while their wife cooks supper in the air fryer.

But why so much hate in such a wholesome endeavor? No one is forcing you to fish a certain way. And as fans of competitive fishing, you have been watching the back of a fisherman on a boat for decades fishing stuff you can’t see under the water. But suddenly it’s become the worst thing in the world to some.

Regretfully, that’s just one small area I see hate in fishing. Follow any niche in fishing and you will see a reoccurring theme. Conventional guys hate fly fishing guys. Fly fishing guys hate gear guys. Streamer guys hate euro nymph guys. Bass guys hate trout guys. Catfish guys hate bass guys. Bank fishermen hate guys with boats. Guys with boats hate guys with kayaks.

For the life of me, I will never understand the miserable mindset in fishing that espouses things like “if you don’t fish the game the way I like, then you are against what I stand for and I need to tear you down.” I mostly feel sorry for these people.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades attempting to help anglers find more enjoyment in fishing. Whether it was keeping up with current trends, new lures, new techniques, advancements in gear and technology, competitive aspects and more. I tried to bring information to anglers to help them take pleasure from fishing more. Fishing provides a release for most people.

For grown men, it might be the closest thing to meditation any of them will ever attempt and desperately need in their lives.

Sure a tiny portion of the greater angling community likes the competitions, but I find myself encouraging others to just find new ways to crossover and experience fishing in new and meaningful ways. I want more anglers to borrow ideas from one niche and apply them to another. I want you to explore new ways to find fulfillment in angling.

The constant hate, I also fear, will have lasting effects. The more fractured the angling community comes, the easier it gets for outside influences to make runs at public lands, access, seasons, regulations, etc. And I think being miserable all the time about your one release because you don’t like the way things are changing or the way someone else does things will ultimately lead to problems in your own life. Not to mention if you keep tearing something down, it won’t be long before those who support the whole thing decide it’s no longer worth the effort. Tournament fishing is already on that path.

Ask yourself: does everyone have to play the fishing game by your rules for you to be happy?

FISH YOUR WAY AND LET OTHERS DO THE SAME

Every human holds biases. We like what we like, and that often creates a bias to things we don’t like. I am as guilty as anyone. There are certain things in fishing I am not a fan of personally. Trolling with multiple rods is an example. For me, personally, it’s not an active enough pursuit. I don’t believe dragging dozens of baits over miles and miles of water is sport fishing. In fact, I have fallen asleep on the few trolling trips both in salt and freshwater I have been on. So it obviously doesn’t appeal to me.

However, I say all that to say this. If trolling is they way you love to fish, and you find the most fulfillment with, then I am all for it. I support you 100%. If trolling gets you fired up for fishing, then I am happy you found a way you really find joy in fishing. I am certainly not going to tear you down for it or belittle your catch because you choose a different game than I did. If you like watching 8 rods with 2 minnows or 2 jigs on each rod and covering large swaths of water in a day, man, I say go for it. I never enjoyed it. And I never will. But I fully support you enjoying it.

In that same vein, let me fish the way I enjoy.

I like one rod in my hand. I have fished with two at a time, one in each hand fishing for crappie in the winter, and I hated that. It felt very unnatural to me. At the core of fishing, I am just trying to fool one fish. The next fish I come across. So I just want one rod in my hand.

I readily admit to occassionally having a couple jigs or flies on a line at times, most often fly fishing where I might have a floating dry with a weighted nymph or emerger fly under it. But for the most part, I want to target one fish at a time with one presentation. Because I really like “tricking fish,” and I really crave the interaction you get with one rod. I want to move the lure, and feel that thump when I trick one.

That direction connection to a wild animal is what does it for me in fishing.

But I won’t try to force my way onto you. What trips my trigger, at times, might do nothing for you.

BUILD YOUR OWN FISHING GAMES

I’ve been reading a book called The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. And in that book the philosophy professor Nguyen explores how scoring systems, metrics and gamification shape our desires and values, arguing they can sometimes lead us to optimize for easily measurable but ultimately hollow goals. He uses examples from fly fishing and how different anglers can set the game up differently to maximize their personal enjoyment of it. He talked about it on a recent Orvis podcast with Tom Rosenbauer.

According to Nguyen, the puzzle is that sometimes, “the scoring system enables the magic playfulness of games and leads to the richer experiences in our life.” However you set the game up, you make it the most rewarding for you personally. While other times, scoring systems seem to drain all the joy out of life and produce a miserable, empty grind. For example, rules and goals in your job that seem arbitrary and unachievable set by people who don’t fully understand the work you do gain be soul sucking.

Fishing should focus on personal enjoyment. If tournament fishing is fun for you, great. That has a predefined set of goals and outcomes to achieve success in that version of a fishing game. But if you are not fishing tournaments, you can set up your fishing game with parameters that challenge and better fit your own personal reward systems.

His discussion on this around fly fishing is what really got me thinking about how guys could find more fulfillment in fishing and maybe see why hating on other guys’ versions of the game is lame.

A bunch of my bass fishing buddies, and even some of my crappie fishing buddies, have been railing me for getting so into fly fishing again. And I am not really sure why fly fishing has been so fulfilling for me until recently thinking through the hate you get in fishing from other folks as well as Nguyen’s thoughts.

Some guys only want to chase big trout on streamers. And I love that version of the fly fishing game myself. But it’s not the only game I have to play to enjoy and feel gratified in fly fishing. I love the challenge of tying a really tiny dry fly and tricking a trout to eat such a tiny little offering in vast and wild environments. I find that to be an ultimate challenge. I also, however, love euro-nymphing a sweet little run dumping into a nice pool. That direct connection to your flies and seeing the line jump and feeling the fish take is equally exhilarating and rewarding for me.

So for me the game is often about just building new parameters based on what the day and location is offering me. Maybe I’m weird. Because I can be very fulfilled catching gills on a fly rod at a neighborhood lake in the rain. Even if they aren’t big, I am maximizing the game for my enjoyment on a body of water that can only offer this much in payback and reward. The system is what the system is. The parameters I set for myself in this system is ultimately where I find reward. The challenge within the challenge.

Some guys can only be happy if they catch big fish. Some guys can only be happy if they catch a lot of fish. Some guys can only be happy if they catch a lot of quality fish. I can be in any one of these mindsets at any given time as well. I like to challenge myself more in fishing these days. And I’ve always felt an underlying drive to prove myself as an angler.

So sometimes, I pick up the fly rod because I know if you give me a Trout Magnet on a fresh plant, I’m going to catch 100 trout. So I want to make the game more challenging for myself. Maybe I don’t catch as many. Maybe I catch them better. Maybe I catch a bigger one. But the parameters offer me an added level of challenge and thus my fulfillment is often greater.

Same for crappie fishing. I like to single pole and cast to fish. I can catch them on a long rod. But I don’t enjoy it as much. I am limited at times with my casting because of wind, current and other factors. But that’s okay because it’s the game and parameters I most enjoy.

Same for bluegills and shellcrackers. I am seeking the big ones. The unique better than average fish. And in that pursuit, I have learned new systems and parameters to make that chase fun for me on a different level than bass fishing or trout fishing.

THE COMMON HATE ON NEW THINGS

Guys will hate on others for using new technology, like Livescope. It’s nothing more than an efficiency tool to me, however. It doesn’t land me where the fish are. My two decades of experience on the lakes and thousands of hours on the water does that. It doesn’t show me where the fish are before I get there. I know general seasonal tendencies born from hours on the water. I still have to hunt for them, and much of the time out in the middle of the lake miles from a shore where you would wander aimlessly and never find one without your modern electronics. Livescope just helps me make more efficient, accurate casts.

I found brush piles 25 years ago with 2D sonar. But it would take me many casts to hit the pile if I didn’t throw a marker buoy once I found it. Then we got GPS units, and I could have a waypoint where I marked that pile and try to line it up on my map. Still, it took me a lot of casts to hit the spot because of wind and current. Then we got side imaging and finding brush piles, stumps and big schools of fish got more efficient for us. We could mark a ton of stuff in a single day, where we used to only find a handful of things in several trips.

Then we got uber detailed mapping that showed us exactly why that offshore spot we found turned out to be so good.

Then we got 360 imaging. Now we could look all around our boat and get an update every 10 seconds or so on where fish or cover was near us while fishing. And no one complained about any of it save for folks who didn’t have the budget or want to spend so much on all these technology advances.

When Livescope hit, it was mostly quiet for several years. Then as anglers got proficiently efficient with the technology, the fishing world seemingly imploded. Suddenly all our lakes were going to run out fish and tournaments were being won by a bunch of cheaters. It made fishing so easy, that now everyone can just catch them at will.

Except that has not been the actual case. A whole bunch of professional anglers catch them no better than they did before Livescope. Some lakes are fishing absolutely incredible right now even with constant Livescope pressure. So reality didn’t really fit the negative narrative.

I got some pretty ugly messages and people wanted me cancelled for speaking out in what they perceived as me being in favor of Livescope. When, in reality, most misinterpreted what I said, or worse yet took it out of context when I was actually simply arguing counterpoints against people saying young guys can’t fish. I for the most part wasn’t defending Livescope. I was pushing back against this underbelly of people that think because someone excelled with the current technology that they can’t fish and are cheating.

No, in my mind, cheating was all the pros in competitive fishing who had gotten information for decades from people when they weren’t supposed to be. Some of these “men” who pulled every trick in the book to gain an unfair advantage with massive networks of people feeding them the latest fishing whereabouts on their next tournament lake, leaving waypoints on boats they “dropped off” for the next tournament, making hot laps in practice to see where everyone was, and everything else under the sun.

That was cheating. Using current technology and putting in thousands of hours of work with it is not cheating.

Livescope gave a bunch of young guys a tool to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on the lake learning areas, watching fish behavior, dissecting places they knew were good to find out why they actually were good. We somehow discounted the thousands of hours of work Livescope spurred these young anglers to employ through high school and college fishing. And because they were able to shortcut their learnings in ways their predecessors never could, we should just disregard any ability they gained along the way and call them cheaters.

Pro anglers preached for years how these young guys needed to learn their sponsors technology to have a chance at being a fishing pro. Then when they did and got really good at it, everyone immediately discredited them. That’s what I was actually defending. A lot of good young anglers have learned the tools better, and Livescope was the most glaring example tournament fishing has ever seen of this.

I talked about it on a podcast recently. I don’t think young guys have a crutch. The guys that fish for Murray State, that are winning so many tournaments around here locally, fish every day. They have arguably spent more time on the water than 90% of the field and folks can’t seem to understand why they win so much. So they need a scapegoat. And the modern technology excuse is the easiest way to make themselves feel better.

Young folks have tools to help them really learn the water, and they are putting previously unrealized amounts of time on the water and doing that better than most others. It’s helping them learn about their lures. It’s helping them learn about fish biology and the ecosystems they fish.

I am not an advocate for Livescope. I actually like fishing on small lakes without any electronics when I can. I often wade creeks and float rivers and use no electronics at all, and I love every minute of it. In fact, all the negativity around electronics is what drove me somewhat back to fly fishing. For the escape to a river with just me and a rod figuring out the fish.

I love to use Livescope for things like crappie fishing offshore. Personally, however, I would rather see tournaments that were match play tournaments than slugfests with electronics. I would rather see guys go to a venue and only flip docks, or only fish a frog on grass or only crank. I like seeing skills on display and who is best at certain skills.

That’s more entertaining to me than watching 100 guys catch 4-pound smallmouth at will on drop shots up north. That has never entertained me. That got lost on me a decade ago, long before Livescope. Every tournament being won on a drop shot or a shaky head or a ned rig before Livescope? No thanks.

So I don’t see guys using Livescope being any different than that. I wish tournament organizers went to venues with more matted up grass and more visible cover. So more skills would be on display. But, it seems there’s always an offshore bite somewhere that wins the derby.

WHAT IS HATED IS JUST A PARAMETER

One of the drawbacks to Kentucky Lake and why not having electronics really puts people behind the 8-ball here is how massive it is. Kentucky Lake holds 4 trillion gallons of water. Something like 2,300 miles of shoreline. And that doesn’t include Lake Barkley right next to it. I’ve lived here 20 years and have seen maybe 40% of the lakes. And I fish more than a lot of anglers.

It’s an unfathomable amount of water to try to breakdown. And our fish are hardly ever close to the bank save for some small windows in the spring and fall. So, for the majority of the year, the fish are way away from the bank on cover or structure you can’t see out in the middle of a creek arm or main lake. It’s too much water to fish with nothing visible to see to fish. Electronics help us break this down into manageable pieces.

I often tell people to go to smaller bodies of water and fish if you have no electronics or fish from the bank. It’s only very small windows where going down the bank fishing on Kentucky Lake will yield much results.

As a rule, I’m a minimalist. If I can have one rod, one technique and catch fish well, I am most content with that. But that doesn’t mean the next angler is content like that. I think as an angling community it would be nice if we just supported the idea that guys can set the parameters however they find most fulfilling and leave them be.

If you’re a good steward of the water, practice safe fishing and abide by the game laws, then who am I to tell you how best to fish. I like the challenge in fishing. I also like the simplicity in fishing. So somedays I want it to be as simple as possible. Some days I like to challenge myself a little more. I think folks should be able to enjoy fishing the way that sets up for them to find the most fulfillment.

Guys try to force a lot of macho bravado into fishing. Stuff like, “you can’t be a real man unless you catch 50-pound fish on 100-pound line.” Or “if you don’t slack line set that 3-pound bass with 20-pound line, you’re not a natural born angler.” It’s all nonsense. Fishing, in and of itself, is not very masculine. Sorry to disappoint you. You outweigh the animal by at least 20X. So settle down.

I live in Kentucky. We have zero native trout. Yet I like to catch trout on a fly rod. I have to get in a truck and drive more than 4 hours to catch trout somewhere with self-sustaining trout populations. So if I go somewhere in state with stocked trout, was I less of angler because I caught stocked trout on a fly being that’s the only option I had?

Most guys won’t admit it, but fishing is the closest most grown men will have to meditation. But they miss that point most of the time because they feel this need to best everyone else at their games. When you could simply set your own parameters to maximize your own fulfillment.

Maybe instead hit the water and say, “I am going to fish the way I like to fish and see what happens. I might throw this topwater all day and see how many I can catch on it. I’m might decide to strip a streamer all day today to see what I can get to show itself.”

Famous fly fishing author John Geriach wrote: “…catching fish is the goal but not the purpose of fly fishing.” Fly fishing can be one of the greatest forms of meditation for anglers. So maybe don’t be so quick to destroy that for guys.

Some will take my words as judgement. I would rather they be taken as uplifting. I hope at the very least, this encourages you to consider finding some new parameters and ways to fish that challenge you and fulfill you more richly in fishing. We’re only here for a short while. Life is too fragile to waste it hating on someone because they enjoy fishing a way that provides you less fulfillment. You both love fishing. Why don’t we just leave it at that.