The point of fishing may not be fishing
And sometimes schools of mackerel laugh at you
I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles. So I don’t fish. You might think, wait, L.A. is on the coast so surely people there fish.
Not the case. No one there fishes, and if they say they do they are totally lying.
The problem in my generation at least was our L.A. dads didn’t fish. They were all 1970s aerospace engineers, more enthralled by Moonshots and two-seat sports cars than by bait and tackle. Yet on the few occasions I did get a random chance to fish—maybe some camping trip well outside the freeways of L.A. county—when someone forced a reel into my little boy hands and said give it a try, I loved it.
So here I find myself decades later living in Frog’s Glen minutes from the wild Pacific Ocean, and everywhere I look there are Japanese people who fish. Some are great at it, some maybe just okay, but each seems to have at least a basic understanding of how to snag some dinner.
I knew that if I was going to pick up this skill, some self-education would be needed. I watched a raft of YouTube videos on ocean fishing and bought myself a rod and reel. I had the tackle shop lady set me up with appropriate weight line, a few basic lures and hooks, and soon went out to the beach to try my luck.
Not a bite, not even a nibble.
But that’s okay. Who’s going to come home with a bucket of fish on their first day? And my aerospace dad didn’t leave me with any skills, right? Fishing is an art and most anyone you see with a rod in his or her hand has spent an entire childhood learning finely-honed techniques needed to read and hunt the waters.
Instructional videos all say that when you get no bites try a different location. Don’t hesistate to pick up and move. And if that doesn’t work, maybe try a different bait. And if that too doesn’t work you could go to a shiny lure. Or pick a different tide time. Or chum the water, or tie a new knot, or use a bigger hook, or…
Well, it’s really quite endless. Fishing might be something like swinging a golf club. Everyone has an opinion on how it’s done, yet until you yourself do it 6,000 times you either whiff, or banana right into the other fairway.
Anyway, I’ve somehow decided that my personal ideal is to become a surf fisherman. Any fisherman will tell you that beach fishing is one of the toughest forms of the sport, but who cares? I simply don’t see myself on rent-a-boats that use unfair sonars to tell you where to cast or sitting on wharfs and piers with the tourists.
No. I have more dramatic fishing dreams. I live, you see, in a solitary lighthouse perched dangerously far out on the last coastal rock. It’s a stark, hard existence but it suits real men of few words like me, Captain Jake ‘Salty’ McCrag. When my small ice box is empty, I descend the lighthouse, grab my rusty rod and reel (handed down to me by my dad who taught me everything about ocean survival), and trudge out alone to the edge of the surf to snag a salmon or two for my dinner that evening. As I await my catch, I brave the blustery salt winds on that unprotected beach, my grizzly stubble beard and dry brown skin cracking in the elements.
Well, that’s the Hollywood version. In reality, I’ve been out to our local beach about five times. As instructed, I never feared to move around. And thanks to YouTube step-by-step tutorials, I tried my best to read the surf.
But still not a bite.
The other day I decided to swallow my Captain McCrag pride and to take my car further down the highway to a marina that I know is filled with local fisherpeople every weekend. Marinas are easier (they say), and of course with others near me, I could always sneak a few peeks at what they are using for bait…maybe pick up some skills. A marina you see would be more synergistic than doing the lighthouse-keeper thing for three years on the sands alone.
I parked and took the time to survey first. Hands in pockets, I sauntered cooly out to one of the concrete wharfs with a medium-size gathering of fishermen. If these people are fishing from this spot, I surmised, it must have potential.
My foreign face got curious looks. Just like when I play golf, I tried to put on the“I definitely know what I’m doing and your suspicions are correct, I’m an accomplished pro” aura. (I don’t know why I do weird things like this…)
However when I threw my first cast and the bait got snagged and slammed into the ground rather than out to sea, and definitely when I next stabbed my thumb with a hook, my cover was blown. I could feel the snickers, “Just as we thought. The gaijin is a total noob.”
I had just shanked my first tee shot into fairway #4.
Funny enough, the marina that afternoon was teeming with fish. You could look straight down into the surprisingly clear water and see SCHOOLS of shimmering mackerel churning left and right just below all of us. I got so excited. I cast and cast right in front of their fishy faces and yet not a bite. The schools swam right past my lure as if it was a rock on a string. I played with pulling the lure slower through the water, then faster, then jerkier, then at higher and lower depths….
The fish were having none of it. The schools must’ve just returned from a three-course lunch or something. Were they pulling into the marina for a bit of a food coma nap?
To make matters worse, every half a minute or so a few of the mackerel would jump out of the water! Ker-splash!! SPLASHFLAPSPLASHSPLASHFLAP.
These punk fish weren’t just laughing at me, they were thumbing their little silver noses at every one of us holding a rod.
This was going nowhere. I decided to put my stuff down and take a slow stroll among my fellow fisherpeople. You know, do a more detailed survey. Who was catching fish today, what was he or she using, and what are the local techniques with these slippery prey?
There were two general groups out there on the marina. The leathery old dudes who I’m sure sit on this same concrete slab pretty much daily and know precisely everything about fishing here, and the Sunday-only families out for some bonding time.
First thing I noticed was that the leather guys came with beers and cigarettes. They smelled like room temperature Asahi Super Dry.
They plopped out their lines with lazy float/bob things and just waited for the bob to get tugged under water. Other than that, they cackled and drank. I’m sure when I sauntered by to serruptitiously peek at their setups, they nudged each other as if to say look at shiroto beginner boy here.
I don’t think they cared less if they caught a fish. Might get one, might not. Either way, it’s a day out of the house without the kids and the wife and some serious pier time with the other bad boys. They probably all grew up togther, and now 50 years later they are still sitting on the same marina bobbing the same bait in precisely the same channel. Some sat on well-rusted folding stools, some just parked their butts on the concrete of the wharf. I wouldn’t be learning a thing from these guys I felt, because they’d probably just say to me oh you speak Japanese well, grin, and then turn back to their beers.
The families were cute. They all kept spraying sun block and many had those peroxide white cream streaks on their noses and cheeks. Each wore a floppy cotton “I’m a Japanese person on vacation” hat. The kids ran around, having given up hours ago, while moms and dads continued to try to hook some of the taunting mackerel as if to show it could indeed be done. Each family came well stocked—not with baits and hooks, but rather with full lunch spreads, a variety of hydrating sports drinks, waters, and juices, camping furniture, and drink coolers hooked up to their hybrid cars.
But you know what? No one—not a single leathery man nor a family person had caught a fish.
In all, I was out there casting at the laughing schools for two hours, so was everyone else, and not a single one of us got even a bite. I never heard one excited “There we go!” or even the whir of a reel. Just cast, plop. Cast, plop.
I think the point for all of us was simply to go fishing on what was actually quite a perfect day. To bring home a cooler full of snapper, mackerel, and flounder wasn’t the point. It was to say to our friends and to ourselves that we went fishing.
To be sure, everyone there, myself included, had a damn good time.
As I often say, the sport is called "fishing", it's not called "catching".
This was another wonderful post of yours, thank you.
My favorite film on the philosophy of fishing (and masculinity as a whole) is To Have and Have Not, with Bogart as the boat captain reluctantly aiding the French Resistance in the Caribbean.