When we’re regularly catching whatever fish we are targeting we manage to convince ourselves that we know all about nature’s mysteries, but when we go through a tough patch with our fishing we look for explanations and reasons as to why it's just not happening. The bait isn’t there, there’s too much bait, the sea is too cold, the sea is too calm/too clear/too murky/too rough, the wind direction isn’t right, the moon phase is wrong, and so on and so on. The angler who thinks is always looking for patterns, and I firmly believe that the absolute best anglers are in some ways a bit better connected to the whole nature thing than most other anglers. But at the end of the day do we really have much of a clue what’s going on out there?
To me it’s a given that there are too many people on the planet taking too many fish out of the world’s oceans, but it’s not just the fish we like to chase that are removed from the seas. What about the fish or other food sources that the fish we chase feed on? What happens to the fish we chase when the food sources they feed on are becoming less plentiful? Would you keep going to the supermarket to buy whole chickens if your local supermarket couldn’t guarantee you your supply? Surely as creatures ourselves we would change our habits over time and shop somewhere else where the supply was more consistent? Hell, give it a few more years and we might all be emigrating further south and breeding our own livestock because we won’t be able to afford to heat our home and run our cars.
As far as I am aware, fish are creatures who basically feed and breed and move and live. We are as well of course, but “some people think that the main differences between humans other animal species is our ability of complex reasoning, our use of complex language, our ability to solve difficult problems, and introspection”. Now I love our bass as much as any of you here, but I am pretty sure they aren’t swimming around and pondering upon such follies as going to war and hate crimes. It continues to fascinate me how each season as such can vary from subtly to radically different to the previous one, and I notice how numbers of anglers are reporting the capture of bass from the shore on lures. I haven’t been out myself for a while for various reasons, but those two single bass I caught around here in February continue to play on my mind because I have tried and failed many times before to catch bass on lures at that time of year - so what was and potentially is the difference this year? We can speculate for sure, but do I know why I found a couple of bass where I did this February when I have never found them there before at that time of year? I do not.
I can and do speculate until the cows come home though (or decide to chase me), and I can come up with any number of reasonable sounding theories, but at the end of the day they are no more than that. Theories. Multiple nights of frost in April 2021 sounds like a reasonable explanation for why the bass fishing took so long to get going last year, but what do we really know? It’s not as if we know so much about what bass feed on that we are successfully “chasing the bait” as such to keep in touch with non-migratory predators, indeed who here knows much about the life cycle of say sandeels which seem to be an important food source for bass? I don’t, but surely I should if I want to better understand where bass might or might not be. Obsessing about fishing tackle is something which I obviously do, but that is also because I find it relatively easy and enjoyable to write about. Writing in depth about the where and when and even the why is not at all easy, not when I feel that so much of it is pure speculation, and especially when things don’t go how we might expect.
I don’t mean to credit these creatures we chase with massive intelligence, rather it interests me how we as human beings tend to apply what we perceive as rational thought upon trying to outwit creatures/fish which I believe are acting purely on a hardwired instinct which they surely aren’t for one second actually thinking about. Surely fish are simply doing what they do based on instinct? Something in their genetic makeup instinctively gets them doing something a bit differently one year because the water might be a bit warmer or colder, or they don’t come across a specific food source which instinct tells them should be there. I don’t believe we will ever know it all, and in many respects I find that fact rather reassuring. If fishing is about trying to outwit nature then is blanking the art of not knowing enough?