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closeScoop du jour: Fishing trips are never about the fish
George Le Masurier
One of the things guys like to do is go on fishing trips. Women think guys go fishing to get away from their workday stresses and compose themselves in the restful tranquility of nature while disfiguring fish.
Guys really just want to get into the fresh air where they can burp and fart at will.
I know this because I recently went on my first all-guys fishing trip. Not being an ardent fisherman, I was more than apprehensive about the experience. Once I realized that to “go fishing” means sitting in a boat while drinking beer and smoking cigars, and later consuming enough chili to blow up a hot air balloon, I started to relax. I only wish I’d brought the jumbo-sized packet of Rolaids.
NOTE TO WIVES: If you think your husbands go fishing to form strong male bonds by sharing their innermost feelings, engaging in group hugs and later writing poetry back in the tent, you are not paying attention.
But, you must ask yourself: do you really want to know?
While it really isn’t the point of fishing trips, killing fish is not a bad thing. Fish are actually a menace to society. They pee in the water. They eat surfers. They made Richard Dreyfuss a movie star. They deserve to die.
Killing fish is not a sin like it is to gun down innocent little creatures who live quietly in the forest such as Thumper and Winnie-the-Pooh, who never ate anybody, not even bad actors.
The reason guys don’t spend much time actually fishing during a fishing trip is because they are so ridiculously easy to catch. My fishing partner equipped his boat with live bait tanks, rod holders, power downriggers, a special silent trolling motor and, the coup de grace, a space-age electronic fish finder.
This is really a common, ordinary depth sounder that shows up debris beneath the surface as fish shapes on its screen. Whenever we bothered to glance over at the device and saw little fish shapes on it, we’d immediately drop our drinks and cigars and start fishing.
Drifting along in the middle of Canadian nowhere with whirlpools trying to swallow us and icebergs and Russian subs headed our way, we attempted to snag one of these fish shapes, which can be purchased already cooked at any fine restaurant for $7.95 with salad and veggies.
Luckily, we didn’t catch anything because that greatly increases the chances of getting fish slime all over the boat.
I’m pretty certain the reason our boat got “skunked” (official Charlie White fishing term) had something to do with screaming herring. We did not use brightly-colored plastic thingies with hooks, called lures, because apparently all the high-quality, good-eating fish prefer live bait.
As I understand it, you impale a live herring on a big hook so that it screams loudly in fish language and annoys all the bigger fish who are trying to sleep, because, let’s face it, what else is there to do down there? Eventually the bigger fish swim over and bite the little herring’s head off to make it shut up and, voila, they’re hooked.
At the end of our three-day trip, which was determined by the point when we had turned a month’s worth of provisions into body fat, our group had caught four fish. That calculated out to about a million dollars per pound, or roughly a gazillion times what it would have cost to buy one at the store.
But you would only say that if you didn’t understand why guys really go fishing.