Learning About Fishing - Part I
What Makes People Want to Fish?
by Zen Hiraga
I’m not entirely sure what makes people take up fishing. Before my first experience fishing, I believed producing results wouldn’t be a problem, or catching fish would be a series of short-lived excitement. Rushing down the cement road to set up my pole and lure thinking about what I might catch, I thought fishing would be as easy as using a magnetic fishing toy. But boy was I proven wrong.
Casting my line for what might have been over seventy times in several different places, I caught nothing. I had a fair amount of confidence in imagining that with the number of times I casted my line, surely, the percentage of possibly catching something would increase. Maybe I was just unlucky to catch nothing at all. I really began to ask the question, what exactly makes fishing such a prominent hobby? As I like to see what I can learn from any kind of failure, or find other perspectives, I really began to think about why it’s enjoyable to fish.
The first thing I imagined was due to reading this magazine. Our class was generating ideas as to what kind of articles there were in this magazine so we could figure out what to write about, and I noticed the majority of articles are about a big catch. Then it came to me, as it obviously should have: Fishing is really enjoyable due to the rarity, or uncommoness of the catch. To put that into a perspective scenario, most people would be excited to find a twenty-dollar bill. That’s because it’s rare, and it’s to them, a large sum of money which isn’t normal to come across. In contrast, a person of great wealth may not even pay attention to the
