Fly-fisherman often try to draw parallels between this sport and hunting. But the fact is they are very different. A hunter goes into the woods before the season even begins. They plan and learn the habits of their target species as part of their due diligence. When the season begins a hunter walks through the woods and notices everything. A print in the mud or a tree branch that a deer rubbed on and left signs of its presence at are things that even an average hunter would never miss. A skilled hunter goes into the season hoping for one animal that justifies their entire season. One elk or a big buck is enough to justify it all. When chances present themselves to shoot the target species, a good hunter has the self-restraint to not take the shot even after sitting in the woods for hours and planning for weeks or months for that moment to take the shot. If the animal isn’t up to their standards, or the clear shot doesn’t present itself from an ethical standpoint, the hunter does nothing and keeps waiting for the right opportunity.
Contrast that with fly-fishing. The average angler goes into a day expecting to catch fish. Numerous fish if the angler is semi experienced. Many anglers if asked the name of a specific insect that is on the water would get it wrong but will resort to flies a shop or guide tells them will work without having an underlying understanding of why. And they’re fine with that. Many anglers now don’t like the idea of wading a river period. The boat and the question of whether a river is floatable with ramps to allow for put in and take out are two basic requirements for an angler to want to visit a given river and see what it’s about. The equivalent in hunting would be you are only willing to hunt if you can buzz around in an ATV and blast away elk from such a vehicle. Walking through the woods and actually finding one is just not your thing. When it comes to raising your standards over time on the target you take the shot on, most anglers are fine with any success generally. Rarely do anglers become truly selective in the targets they choose to focus on. They go through an initial growth spurt in terms of knowledge/skill and then plateau and repeat the same process over and over. Whether it’s catching fish in the same spots over and over that are somewhere between 12-22’’ on healthy waters, or just sticking to small water they started on catching small wild fish in pretty settings, the selectivity factor doesn’t really set in for most fly-fisherman. Anglers have coined phrases such as “they’re all good” to justify appreciating catching any fish of any size, whereas if a hunter said “they’re all good” to justify shooting a fawn he would be deemed an embarrassment to the sport. Even if hunters shot with a paintball gun instead of bullets and pelted a fawn with a ball of paint, would we celebrate that to appreciate the big picture message “they’re all good”? Or would we question whether that’s fair game? I’ll end this intentionally troubling series of comparisons by asking what is the difference between shooting a fawn with a paintball gun and targeting trout in a small tributary that are only a few inches long and confined to very obvious and clear holding areas in low volume streams? A non-fatal paintball to the gut of a fawn is more painful than a metal hook to the face of a trout that’s less than a foot long and predictably stuck in a bathtub sized area? A fish that’s bigger that’s two plus feet and clearly exposed in a stream they’re spawning in that’s small quarters and not real sport? It doesn’t pass the smell test. The fact is that fisherman are motivated by doing what they have to do in order to find some level of success each time with relatively very little effort or thought applied. Many anglers fish a spot for 10-20-30- god forbid 60 minutes and if they don’t see anything they start thinking they have to make a move. Imagine a hunter going in the woods for 45 minutes, saying alright there’s no elk here let’s get in the car and drive to the next mountain over? For this reason, I think it’s insulting to hunters to say the angling community belongs. And in all honesty, it would be more fair to equate fly-fishing to golf. Most people claim to golf, but most never break 100. The stated purpose for the day is a hobby like description where keeping score doesn’t matter, other factors like socializing with friends, enjoying the course and outdoors, and everything but results are cited as the reasons the game is played. Fly-fishing like golf also involves a lot of people that project a lot about their level of skill and commitment that often gets exposed when the day on the water or course comes. Wind, boats, no boat, equipment failures generally, fake injuries, illnesses, and so forth are commonly cited reasons why anglers aren’t as hardcore as they previously described. Hunters don’t blame their gun, and they don’t socialize when in the field hunting their target. There’s no room for ego and pretending a fake set of priorities related to enjoyment matter over the goal at hand. Finding one animal that provides them with an opportunity to take the shot and make their season. Taking down an animal that meets their standards means they achieved that goal and coming up empty means they failed. And they apply the information they learned to better position themselves the following season for success regardless of whether the goal was accomplished that season.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve grown mindful of the distinction between being a hunter and a fisherman. I recognized how my mentality as a fisherman was flawed after years of adopting the views this sport’s culture naturally instills. Did I want to have deja vu moments every season where my best fish was the same 20-22’’ and maybe lie that one of those 22’’ fish was a “two-footer” when trout fishing? Or did I want to actually start approaching each season with higher standards and aim to accomplish something harder each year? This honestly was not easy to do at first. You create habits about where you go, and you see set ups that you know are going to be good that you have habitually let dictate your program for years. How do you start conditioning your mind to ignore that and do something different even when being conscious of predictable set ups that nearly guarantee success? You start by doing it reluctantly, and then often experience an immediate set of let downs that cause you to question the mentality shift entirely. Most anglers quit there and revert back to the program that was already working. The initial attempt to transition to being a hunter reinforces why most anglers cannot be equated to one. However, the initial attempt to live a day in the life of a hunter does appeal to some that find joy in hunting fish. Initial failure becomes a chip on their shoulder where the urge and instinct becomes remaining persistent and figuring out a better strategy. Thinking harder about how to approach lower percentage situations becomes enjoyable and is viewed as justified in pursuit of the fish of the season. Sometimes the fish of a lifetime. Because hunting a trophy animal with fins or generally is always hard, you are forced to evolve and develop your skills and knowledge pertaining to the environment you are hunting in and the species you are after.
For every angler that wants to truly improve year over year, becoming a hunter is an essential transformation that must occur first. Pursuing an intended target not just for a day, but for a season is an exercise in mental discipline. You start critically thinking about where that target likely lives. You start thinking about conditions that allow for you to get within range of the target without them detecting you or being overly concerned by your presence. Sometimes you are wrong about where you thought you would find an opportunity and you determine after a series of efforts that the place isn’t likely to produce the target. Or that the watershed only offers potential for a top end fish under a very specific and rare set of conditions. You evaluate every place you explore and go with this same lens. Do I think I can find the fish of the season here? What are the ideal conditions to be able to target that? Certain hatch? High water? Low water and good bugs that trigger the biggest fish to show themselves? Night time even though mouse fish don’t really count the same way? You create categories in your mind for watersheds and know where they fit in during various parts of the season to try and find that fish of the season. And even when you try and remain disciplined to this approach, sometimes you come up short. I’ve come to accept that being a hunter means you hope to move or have the shot at 6 fish or less that matter each season and stand out in your memory. Some years you take advantage of those 6 opportunities, and some years you botch all 6. Sometimes you don’t get 6 chances and have to chalk it up to bad decision making for that given year on where you spent your time and when. You accept that is part of the process and commitment to actually finding a target worth pursuing as your standards go higher each season. Just like a hunter doesn’t take the shot on a young buck they know doesn’t check the box for them after years in the field, a skilled angler doesn’t remain stuck in a setting repeating a familiar process that targets fish they’ve caught many times before. They are willing to be selective and pass on ordinary sized targets in favor of finding a memorable fish that matters to them on that given season. If they don’t get that opportunity, they can live with it.
Hunting while fly-fishing was something that I initially thought was limited to certain methods and limited situations. As a dry fly first angler, I believed that a ceiling sets in and that I wasn’t going to do better than the average big fish of the year on any healthy river you commonly see shared on social media daily. I have grown to realize how truly wrong I was, and that this was simply a time where I had not developed the selectivity that a seasoned hunter possesses. The draw to dry fly fishing is the love for sight fishing and the specific sighting of a rise. It is hard to resist throwing to one when you see it. It is especially hard to resist throwing to a rise that you know has been made by a good-sized fish. However, developing this restraint during times that that certain bugs present an opportunity to find a standout specimen arguably makes the dry fly the best way to find a fish of a lifetime. Passing on a 20’’ fish during a late evening coffin fly spinner fall knowing that you have less than an hour to locate a fish that might not rise again all season is a calculated risk that you have to be willing to take. Sometimes, rotating to waters that are low percentage, but which offer short windows of opportunity on the surface are places you have to be willing to take the shot on instead of the steady pressured fishery you know will produce numerous good fish on that same day. Thinking about what bugs are likely to be good on a piece of water based on the habitat there is something you think about and put numerous days in to confirm or rule out before giving up. You stop thinking that fishing 6-7x and size 22 or smaller bugs is going “high level” or technical, and acknowledge you’re likely stuck below a ceiling after getting the fish you’ve commonly found to be your best fish of the season on the waters you frequent. You instead start carrying tippet sizes between 2-5x and creatively think about how you can get away with bigger flies that the fish will still respond to. You do this to get away with heavier tippet and to make sure you have enough hook to maximize your chances of landing one of those 6 fish or less you find each season that justify it all. Any time you get broken off on a known 6 fish or less candidate, you blame yourself for not sticking to the above program- and not the fish as “the one that got away”. Most fly-fisherman fish in a way where they hope to produce success generally and which is expected to cause/allow the escape of a true fish of the season or lifetime. Anglers rely on nostalgia and find joy in rehashing stories of these very escapes. Meanwhile, an experienced hunter never uses a weapon that is insufficient for the task at hand. Other aspects of fishing beyond trout fishing have solidified for me what it truly means to be a hunter in the context of fly-fishing. Fishing for permit all week knowing that as you board a flight to go on that trip you have a better than slim chance of coming back empty handed, swinging flies for steelhead out west as wild returns decline, trying to land a rooster fish from the beach all were challenges where I knew that the mentality going in was one fish. I was going to try and get one fish and likely wouldn’t get it. Sometimes that happened and I went back only to have it happen again. But ultimately, I eventually got each one. Every “one fish” species is a mental gut check for an angler that allows them to assess the confidence they have in themselves and their willingness to pursue a true challenge in this sport. While it might seem extreme in the angling world to sign up for situations that involve these odds, it’s the mentality that a hunter has every single time that they go on a hunting trip anywhere. They’re going for one animal, and fully understand they might get nothing. Fly-fishing is a sport where you will most certainly plateau quickly in your progression based on the differences between hunting and fishing when it comes to the mentality each sport requires and promotes. The solutions as an angler are to remain content or to recognize what a hunter truly is, and whether you want to become one