THE LIAR, THE EXAGGERATED AND THE ILLUSIVE

On one occasion a guy assured me that every time he fished he would take an average of 100 trout a day. I replied: you don’t even have enough time to change flies. At an average of 2 minutes per fish, not counting the time spent tying knots, fixing bottom lines, and finding the right fly, they add up to a total of 200 minutes, plus 100 more for all the necessary changes above, for a total of 300 minutes, which translated into hours is a total of 5 hours without stopping to catch trout and all at the first cast. At the end of each day I suppose he should go to a physiotherapist to relax and heal his stiff muscles.

The bouncer in question had a fishing business and I suppose he told the same story to everyone who appeared in front of the counter, thinking that they would believe his story and buy and order more fly fishing equipment from him. The guy had a vest hanging behind the counter that was so loaded with material that it weighed a hundredweight. When you asked him how he could go to the river so full of material that he could not even find, he replied that he always went fishing with everything he needed, which led me to think that perhaps he would also have thought of taking a tent portable in case the hundred fish weighed more than necessary and should spend the night in the river.

This man not only assured that each and every one of his fishing days were like this, but that he would look at you with a stunned face if you did not give him the appropriate credit.

The best defense against a compulsive liar is to ignore them and the best attack is to grin at them. Compulsive liars believe their own lies and fortunately they are not very abundant; I say luckily because it is a real pain in the ass to hear a guy explain a similar thing to you … almost better to tell him that he will tell you about it another time and go out on the run.

In fly fishing for trout, which is the only one that I practice, apart from some sporadic outings and very from year to year to seabass, what tends to be more or less exacerbated exaggeration, either spaced or continued .

“I caught some huge fish in the river so and hey well, they kept jumping, baiting and catching my special fly, which I ride like this … and all the additional story”

Or … in the place where the river X, I was bitten by a trout so big that it measured almost a meter and must have weighed more than eight kilos, in an impressive fattening where the whole river was teeming with large and enormous trout that did not stop swallowing flies !

The guy in question didn’t catch anything, he doesn’t even have a bad photograph of the place and the moment, and the super specimen was a big and beautiful trout that fortune had nailed to his hook, he had split the nylon because it was too fine.

The good man simply exaggerates what he has lived, because surely there were large fish in activity and where there were five he counted a dozen and the one that stung him seemed so large and sublime that he did not believe the fish that he had hooked at the end of the line . He must have stammered, trembled with excitement, not knowing how to bring that big fish to shore, which he thought was enormous, and when he returned home, the blessed event had turned into legend in the hours he spent in the car on the way back speaking through phone with the wretch who had to listen to him.

If it is a friend who we know what it is like, the best we can do is listen to him and ask him the place and without reproaching him, suggest that the fish in the distance seems much larger than it really is, that appearances can be deceiving, but that the overflowing emotions that fishing provides are fantastic and that we too want to be bitten by a fish like the one we intended to fish, even for once in our lives.

The deluded person is that fisherman who is told a story to or simply reads it on the internet and believes it at face value. For example, the formidable fishing in a distant river in an inhospitable country. The man saves enough money to go fishing in those distant lands with the faith and illusion of a child who awaits the gift of Santa Claus, until the appointed day arrives when he embarks on the journey to those wonderful landscapes with that sublime river packed to overflowing with huge trout and salmon that have ever seen a hook in their lives. The hapless man has already paid and tries to catch a huge fish in a river that is not even remotely what he has been told or rather sold. He in the end he returns from his trip without having gotten those promised catches. Soulless and somewhat sad, he simply consoles himself for not having had better luck, after having spent many days fishing in that river that he supposed to be infallible. This man is naive.

The best thing about fishing is knowing that you never know what might happen. Enjoying the tranquility of the river and the beauty of the landscape, the good food with hunger won in the river, the friends and the bites of the fish are the great prizes of fishing. Expectations and even more so, false expectations are not recommended, wherever you go. Big plans also tend to fail very often. Both are responsible for major disappointments.

You go fishing alone or in good company and in good health and that’s it. The great results, the colossal fish and the infallible rivers only exist in very rare occasions and in very short periods of time.

~ Carles V.