Why Fish?

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why I fish.

There are easy answers.

I like being outside. I like the challenge. I like learning new water and figuring out fish I don’t understand. I like the preparation almost as much as the trip. I like watching weather systems, river flows and water temperatures and trying to decide what they’re going to mean two days from now.

And yes, I like catching fish.

All of those answers are true.

None of them are the answer.

The real answer goes back much further.

It goes back to my grandfather.

He taught me to fish.

At the time, I doubt I understood what he was actually giving me.

I thought he was teaching me how to catch a fish.

What I Remember

Memory is strange.

The older I get, the less interested I am in whether every detail of an old memory is exactly right.

I remember being with him.

I remember fishing.

I remember watching.

I remember wanting to understand what he understood.

There are probably things he showed me a hundred times that I’ve forgotten completely. And there are small things that somehow survived.

How to do something with my hands.

When to wait.

When to try again.

The feeling that something might happen at any moment even when nothing had happened for a very long time.

I didn’t have words for any of that then.

I was just fishing with my grandfather.

That’s enough for a kid.

It took getting older to understand there was more happening.

He Was Teaching Me to Pay Attention

Fishing requires patience, but I’ve never thought patience quite describes it.

You’re not simply waiting.

You’re watching.

You’re noticing.

You’re making small adjustments based on things that might not mean anything.

You’re trying again.

That’s what I remember about learning to fish.

There wasn’t an immediate answer to everything.

Sometimes you did the right thing and caught a fish.

Sometimes you did exactly the same thing and didn’t.

You learned to live with that.

My grandfather couldn’t make the fish bite.

He could only show me what he knew and let me experience the rest.

There is something important in that.

I just didn’t recognize it at the time.

Then Life Gets Bigger

Eventually you grow up.

The world gets considerably louder.

Work.

Family.

Responsibilities.

Deadlines.

Phones.

Schedules.

Problems that need answers immediately.

You get very good at measuring days by what you accomplished during them.

Fishing operates on a different clock.

The water doesn’t know I’m busy.

The tide isn’t particularly concerned about my schedule.

Fish don’t care how far I drove to get there.

I can prepare.

I can study.

I can make a good decision.

But once I’m standing beside the water, I have to accept the terms that were there before I arrived.

I’ve come to appreciate that more as I’ve gotten older.

And I wonder how much of it started beside my grandfather.

I Still Want to Figure It Out

This is probably where my own version of fishing has diverged from his.

I’ve become fascinated by the information.

Weather. Water temperature. Flow. Pressure. Tides. Run timing. Catch history.

I’ve gone far enough down that road that I’m now building a system to bring those things together and help answer a question fishermen have probably asked forever:

Should I go?

My grandfather certainly didn’t have access to all of this.

Sometimes I wonder what he would think of it.

I suspect there are parts he’d find useful and parts he’d think I was making far too complicated.

He might be right.

Because after all the data has been collected and the conditions have been scored, I still have to do exactly what he taught me.

Go to the water.

Pay attention.

Make a cast.

See what happens.

I Understand the Gift Differently Now

When you’re young, you tend to measure what people teach you by the thing they taught.

Someone teaches you to drive.

Someone teaches you to build something.

Someone teaches you to fish.

Only later do you realize that sometimes the activity wasn’t the important part.

The important part was the time.

My grandfather gave me his.

That may be what I understand differently now.

He took me fishing.

Which meant there were hours when I got to stand beside him, watch him, ask questions and learn something he knew.

There was no efficiency to it.

We weren’t accomplishing anything particularly important.

We were just together.

I couldn’t have understood the value of that then.

I do now.

Why Fish?

So when someone asks why I fish, I can give them all the usual answers.

Because I love being outside.

Because I enjoy figuring things out.

Because there is always another river, another species, another technique and another question.

Because sometimes a fish hits and for a few seconds absolutely nothing else exists.

All true.

But there is another answer underneath those.

Because my grandfather took me fishing.

He couldn’t have known where that would lead.

He couldn’t have known that decades later I’d still be looking at water and wondering what might be underneath it.

He couldn’t have known I’d eventually become interested enough in those questions to start Outside Lines PNW or try to build tools to answer some of them.

He was just taking his grandson fishing.

But somewhere during those days, fishing became part of me.

And now when I go, I’m carrying something forward that started long before any of this.

Not because I’m trying to recreate those days.

I can’t.

Not because every trip is some solemn remembrance of him.

It isn’t.

Most days I’m thinking about wind, fish, gear, the next cast or why the hell what I’m doing isn’t working.

But he’s in there.

In the reason I went in the first place.

In the instinct to look toward water and wonder.

In the belief that a day spent trying to catch a fish is a perfectly reasonable way to spend a day.

He taught me that.

I just didn’t know it was one of the things he was teaching me.

So why fish?

For me, I think the answer has been there all along.

Because he taught me to.

And I never stopped.

Maybe that’s where this comes full circle.

Because now I’m trying to do some version of what my grandfather did for me.

I’m trying to pass along what I know.

The difference is that he seemed to make it look a lot easier than I do.

I thought part of that would be teaching.

Instead, I keep discovering how much I still have to learn.

Some of the people I’m trying to help know more about a piece of water than I ever will. They challenge things I thought I understood. They point out what I’ve missed. They share decades of experience I don’t have. Sometimes they simply tell me I’m wrong.

And sometimes I am.

That’s become one of my favorite parts of this.

The more I try to pass along what I’ve learned, the more I learn from the people I’m trying to pass it along to.

Maybe my grandfather understood that too.

Maybe that’s why I don’t remember the lessons feeling much like lessons.

He just took me fishing.

He showed me what he knew.

And somewhere along the way, I learned.

That’s what I’m trying to do here.

I’m just not nearly as good at it yet.