Why I Haven’t Hit Record

I have the cameras. More than one, actually.

I have microphones, batteries, storage and editing software. I have enough fishing gear that “I’m not ready” stopped being a believable excuse a while ago. I have places to fish, trips planned, and things I want to talk about. I even built Outside Lines PNW around the idea of learning about fishing and sharing what I find.

There is really only one thing missing.

I have to turn the camera on.

For reasons I’m still trying to understand, that has proven considerably harder than buying one.

Writing Is Safe

I’ve become comfortable writing about fishing. Maybe too comfortable.

Writing gives me time. I can start with a thought that isn’t particularly good and work on it until it becomes something closer to what I meant. I can delete a sentence, move a paragraph, or realize halfway through that my original argument was wrong and quietly rebuild the entire thing. Nobody sees any of that. You see the finished version.

That’s a wonderful arrangement.

Video doesn’t work that way. A camera captures the unfinished version of me: the pause, the wrong word, the thing I thought I understood until I tried to explain it out loud. My face. My voice. The awkwardness of standing alone beside a river talking to a small black box while another fisherman twenty yards away is probably wondering what the hell I’m doing.

Writing lets me control what leaves the room.

Video requires me to leave it.

I’m Not Sure I Have the Right to Teach This

There is another part of the hesitation that’s harder to admit.

Fishing is full of people who know more than I do. A lot more. There are fishermen who have spent thirty years on water I’ve fished twice, people who understand salmon better than I ever will, people who can read a river almost instinctively or know a particular lake down to individual pieces of structure.

Guides. Biologists. Commercial fishermen. People who grew up doing this.

Then there’s me with a GoPro.

What exactly am I supposed to tell them?

Writing about what I’m learning feels different. Turning a camera toward myself can feel like making a claim:

Listen to me. I know something.

I’m not always comfortable making that claim, because one of the things fishing has taught me repeatedly is how easy it is to think you understand something right before the water proves otherwise.

Then There’s Vanity

There is no particularly sophisticated way around this one.

I’m also worried about looking stupid.

There. That’s probably closer to the truth than anything about production quality or educational value.

I don’t particularly want to watch myself. I’m not convinced I want to hear myself either. I will notice everything: how I stand, how I talk, what I do with my hands, every verbal habit I didn’t know I had, every pound I’d rather not see from that particular camera angle.

And the internet is not famous for letting people experiment privately. Maybe nobody watches. Maybe ten people watch. Maybe someone leaves a comment explaining that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Worse, maybe they’re right.

Fishing itself doesn’t require an audience. You can be terrible at something for years in relative peace. Video turns learning into something other people can watch.

Maybe I’m Thinking About the Camera Wrong

The mistake may be assuming that making fishing videos requires me to be the expert.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Outside Lines was never supposed to be built around me having all the answers. Quite the opposite. I’ve spent a lot of time building systems that separate what we know from what we assume. I’ve documented when predictions were right and, more importantly, when they were wrong. I’ve written about confidence and the danger of confusing a fish with proof, and about passing along what I know while discovering that the people I’m trying to help have things to teach me.

Maybe the videos should work the same way.

Instead of:

Here’s how you catch fish.

Maybe:

Here’s what I think is happening. Let’s find out.

That’s a very different video, and a much more honest one.

But That May Be the Point

My grandfather taught me to fish. I’ve thought a lot about that lately.

He didn’t wait until he possessed complete knowledge of fishing before taking me. He showed me what he knew. Then we went fishing.

I’ve written that I’m trying to do some version of the same thing now: pass along what I’ve learned, learn from the people I’m trying to help, keep getting better. There’s a problem with saying that while refusing to be seen learning. If I publish the successes and hide the uncertainty, I’m presenting something that isn’t true. And if I wait until I feel qualified enough that nobody can reasonably criticize me, I’m probably never turning the camera on.

There will always be someone who knows more.

Good. I hope they watch. Maybe they’ll tell me what I’m missing.

The Failure Gets Recorded Too

There’s an obvious consequence. If I’m going to record the question, I also have to record the answer, even when the answer is that I was completely wrong.

I can already imagine it. I explain why the fish should be on a particular piece of structure. Water temperature is right. Conditions make sense. Everything lines up. I confidently point the camera toward the water.

Then I fish for six hours and catch absolutely nothing.

That’s not the fishing video we’re used to seeing. But maybe it should be, because that’s fishing.

A lot of fishing content compresses a day into the moments when something happened. Cast. Cut. Fish. Cast. Cut. Bigger fish. Watching it, you’d think fishing consists mostly of catching fish, with short inconvenient periods of casting between them.

My fishing doesn’t look like that. I suspect yours doesn’t either. There are long stretches when nothing happens. There are bad decisions, and good decisions that don’t produce fish. There are theories that fail, fish that make absolutely no sense, and drives home spent trying to figure out what I missed.

If I’m going to make videos, those parts have to survive the edit.

Preparation Can Become Avoidance

This may be the part I need to hear myself say.

At some point, preparation stops being preparation. It becomes procrastination with better equipment.

I can buy another camera. Research another microphone. Learn another feature in DaVinci Resolve. Watch another video about camera placement. Build another spreadsheet. Plan another episode. Wait for better weather, a better trip, or until I’m more comfortable talking to the camera.

All of those things feel productive. None of them produces a video.

Fishing has its own version of this. You can stand on the bank tying knots, changing lures and reorganizing gear all morning. Eventually you have to make a cast.

The First Video

So maybe I’ve been putting too much pressure on the first one.

It doesn’t need to establish Outside Lines PNW. It doesn’t need to prove I know what I’m doing. It doesn’t need drone footage, perfect audio or a fish every four minutes, and it certainly doesn’t need to compete with people who have been doing this for ten years.

It needs to exist.

Turn the camera on. Explain where I am and what I think. Go fishing. Be wrong if I’m wrong. Catch something if I’m fortunate. Pay attention. Come home, edit it honestly, publish it.

Then make another one.

It’s the same loop as every trip report I’ve written: predict, fish, record what happened, learn from it.

Showing the Attempt

I’m still afraid of making fishing videos. Writing this didn’t fix that, and I’m not sure it’s supposed to. Maybe courage isn’t reaching the point where turning the camera on stops feeling uncomfortable. Maybe it’s accepting that discomfort isn’t a reason not to do it.

The water isn’t waiting for me to become a better filmmaker. And nobody needs another person on the internet pretending to have fishing completely figured out.

I can offer something else. I can show the attempt: what I thought, what happened, what I got wrong, what I learned. Then go back and try again.

The first one will be from Hood Canal in November.

If nothing bites, you’ll see that too.