Ah yes, silly season is upon us. That moment on the internet when madness descends on anglers and keyboard warriors and they start getting restless and mouthing off to each other about nonsense. I first witnessed the phenomenon well over 15 years ago and it usually happened just after Christmas when folk got a new computer delivered by Santa and then in later years as folk got tablets and laptops. People did not know how to behave online and looked up things they were interested in and then attacked them as that quite frankly is the weird weegie west of scotland way. Back when UrbanFlyfisher started out I was the first thing about fishing that folk usually found – thankfully now people are redirected to the pig pen of facebook or the heavily monetized Youtube where they can spout their vileness however at least now you actually know their names instead of the monikers which folk used years ago.
I was pondering this as I read through yet another facebook argument between folk that really should know better – squealing about who the better fisher is and slagging off casting styles and who tied better flies. It was all just very churlish and schoolboy-like. It was prompted because someone had posted on facebook about a grayling angler who had caught a salmon whilst fishing. Someone said it was unsporting and then the creator of the youtube video jumped in.
And of course on YouTube viewers make money – you reading this right here does not create me a penny, I do not have any adverts and nobody sends my any free stuff anymore as they know that they would rather send it to a YouTuber who relies on free stuff going there way to create content to make them money – it’s all a rather sad capitalist cycle. Not that this particular YouTuber does this however, going by the reaction to the comment the old “methinks you doth protest too much” kicks in fairly quickly.
Which brings me to the silly season of what people post on facebook and youtube – back in the day you would never post a photo of an out of season fish – if you did post a photo it was as an apology with a full confession regarding what a mistake that you had made and that from that moment on you would change your ways and it would never happen again. The few people that went Grayling fishing (because not many people did it 10 years ago) would shamefully state that they had hooked into a number of Salmon and moved on because they were probably stomping all over the reds. Whereas now people are quite happy to go stomping through areas that salmon are spawning in the hunt of grayling- even worse this stuff is being put on facebook and youtube as content – what people need to realise is that even though this may be done in the most innocent way you never know how many people you may have influenced to go an fish for those salmon that you have shown to be so easy to catch – all they need to say is that they are fishing for the Grayling.
Posting pictures of out of season fish is just a bit uncouth.
There is a rumour that there are in fact Grayling in the Kelvin – I rather stupidly started this by posting a few pictures of enormous Grayling my pal had caught on another river. I failed to state what river they were caught in. This was way back when I refused to disclose my identity – the good old days. I then within days met guys on the riverbank regaling me with how there were grayling in the Kelvin and that they had seen pictures on the internet. I tried to clarify where the pictures came from however the damage was done – 15 years later and we still get folk that think they have caught a Grayling in the main stem of the river when it is in fact a smolt.
The thing that I have come to realise now is that the stuff you put on the internet about the fragility of fishing is actually a very dangerous thing – take the last time I went fishing just before the season ended.
I am unsure why we always leave it until the last moment to get the tubes out and hit a loch. Personally I wanted to head to Loch Ba and catch a thousand bandies however I was promised a dozen trout over a pound and was told that if I was catching wee ones I had to move a few yards to get into the big ones again. I think it was Paul that said that once he got bored with catching pound and a half trout he was going to drag the depths and pick up some really big ones.
The only problem with this loch was the absolutely gruelling uphill slog it took to actually get to it – the other issue was that we would be hauling in our float tubes. Paul had a special harness or something, I just stuck mine on my back – turns out there was no correct way to hike vertically up a hill carrying a float tube. I fell twice – nobody noticed as I was trailing along the rear, the mud gave it away.
The only consolation was knowing that at the end of the slog we were going to be catching enormous trout.
Eventually we got to the loch and Alex had a cast and instantly caught a nice trout – things were looking good. We pounded that loch all day and only managed to drag up some wee ones.
Turns out that it was pretty much the only trout left – there are another couple of ways in you see and it looked like this wee loch had been a victim of the lockdown, multiple set lines and bubble floats had been used – we found the remains of fires as well.
So you see, this was a wee loch that was hardly spoken about on the internet and all it took was some characters who could not travel far to pound it out of existence. Imagine someone with a high def camera directing flok to it with tales of huge trout.
And folk wonder why I only post the wee ones.