There is an insidious disease passing around the fly fishing world. It starts in early spring and slowly works to a crescendo by late fall. Now, if you have spent any time on the water, you might be thinking about Whirling Disease.
The disease that causes trout to swim in circles? It is not that disease; it is one that is worse. It costs fly fishers thousands of dollars, maybe even millions.
This disease is called collecting, or in the flyfishing world, being a “Gear Hound.”
LINK (via In Depth NH)
To “sorta” paraphrase Oscar Wilde (speaking about a very different but just as peculiar British sporting matter a long time ago), this is surely a case of, say, the life-long totally inept and permanently fishless in full pursuit of the almost certainly unfishable?
We have such sorts in the UK. We call them Tackle Tarts. A good many of them will even cheerfully to being one.
Perfectly harmless sorts, of course – at least until an overreaching, rather missed the point few start believing that they are the One True Voice of Angling, The Keepers of the Keys to some imaginary Super Man Cave Angling Valhalla etc, at which time – the up-to-the-minute, carbon and plastic, modern one, not their wildly deluded , Raiders of The Lost Ark “Traditional Angling” version – anybody who can actually fish and is mostly if not wholly sane is left with no alternative but to take them out, stand them in front of the nearest ancient English Oak, then compassionately put them out of their “I might be a bit eccentric and stuck in my ways, but the today’s faithless Far East carbon copies are SO wrong (etc)”misery, so ending real life, real world, modern day, here and now for all its troubles Angling’s and its real life etc, this ain’t some old bloke’s impssible, Recall The Beginning – Journey From Eden [great early ’70s, pre-mass fame Steve Miller Band album and title track, by the way] dream, participants’ misery.
Right. That’s told ’em. Boote out.