Fishing for beginners - magazines

Actually Catching Something.
Advice for Parents of Young Anglers

Fish Suppers for Sailors
A guide to fishing for yachtsmen.

Why is everything in the fishing magazines so complicated?

Blame it on lazy journalism.

It's not easy to find new things to say about angling. Fish don't change much. The methods that worked 100 years ago still work just as well today. Ok, there are new items of tackle available although very few of them are genine innovations — so what topics does a journalist have to write about?

• Match Fishing: Every week there are competitions that generate a set of results and league tables which fill a few columns and create lists of of people who might even buy a copy to see their names in print. So match fishing gets extensive coverage.
• New tackle: They may not be genuine innovations but the manufacturers are constantly bringing out new models so reviews and comparisons abound.
• Big fish: All anglers have some interest in big fish and are curious as to how they are caught.
• Ideas, speculation and 'new' solutions to 'new' angling problems.
• Ummmmmmmm... It's getting difficult now and there are still acres of paper to fill...

Match fishing

Is a highly specialised subset of angling. It's about as closely related to ordinary fishing as Formula One motor racing is to the school run. Because matches are so over-reported in the angling press the techniques used are over-hyped and the poor beginner is swamped with inappropriate advice.

New tackle

Is a fashion item. Buy last year's model, it will be remaindered at under half price.

Big fish

A slightly tricky one this. Apart from a very few truly extraordinary specimens the bulk of the big fish pictures are personal best catches by people who are not used to taking big fish and so are proudly showing off their catches — there is nothing at all wrong with this. The people who catch most of the larger fish don't see them as special and so submit relatively few pictures.

In consequence the methods that worked to catch most big fish are under reported and the ones that are used by relativly less successful anglers are over reported. This leads to...

Ideas, speculation and 'new' solutions...

But the 'new' problems they address are rarely new or else they are created by the anglers themselves. For example:

• In freshwater anglers create ever more complicated 'rigs' to allow them to fish as close to the far bank as possible — instead of creeping round and fishing straight under the rod tip.
• On the beach everything is sacrificed to long casting which is a highly specialised technique about which endless tiny details can be discussed at length whilst the more successful angler may wander further along the beach until he spots a feeding fish just a few yards out and drops a bait in front of its nose.

Ordinary angling doesn't sell magazines

Because few people will buy copies every week to read about simple things they already know well.