My only point of disagreement is that in my opinion, the smaller the fish the more dramatic the self delusion is when it is caught on a rod. It doesn’t have to bend the rod to get the effect of the lever. So fly fishermen derive many benefits from their rods!

I often wonder also about the effect of concealment that water has- the surprise of seeing something appear from either the murk or the curtain of surface ripples.

In purely theoretical yet surreal terms, the art of fly fishing could be wonderfully applied to birds- the hardness of the beak making catching even more difficult. But think of the species! The common coarse birding with worms in the garden, to real fly birding for swallows and swifts on the wing. Or whacking great flies cast from cliffs for falcons. The cognitive dissonance of these things are wondrous to behold. I don’t think the ‘pain’ or ‘higher animals’ arguments hold true- I find it difficult to imagine a sparrow or pigeon as a more sentient or worthwhile animal than a tuna. Albatrosses of course are being decimated by long line fishermen in the southern oceans- so in practical terms catching birds with hook and line is going on at a large scale even as I write.

Thanks for your comment. I was clearly wrong, or incomplete in the case of fly fishermen. I don’t think the lever effect is entirely wrong for all fishermen, though.

Firstly i’d like to say that I have read some of your posts with interest, after a link from the Karate forum!

As a relative of a keen angler and with some interest of my own i’d like to perhaps give another viewpoint on the use of Rods, in responce to your suggestion that anglers use them primarily to make fish appear larger than they are. (I know this wasn’t what your post was primarily concerned of course).

Something you didn’t mention was the use of rods for fake casting, in relation to fly fishing. This is a technique used to allow plenty of line to be thrown out onto the water so that the angler can retrieve the flies (home tied in my relatives case) by hand, and allowing enough slack so the line can be ‘rolled’ through thier fingers in order to mimick the behaviour of a spider or nymph on the water surface. This is something that would be far more difficult to achieve with just some line and a hook, concerning the distance, presentation and of course how much line you can cast out onto the water.

This shows that the rod came in to play as a tool for enhancing technique.

Certainly, all the anglers in sport fly fishing i know are not phased by size of the fish, its the experience of tying your own fly and outsmarting fish with them. Plus, most of them only fish rivers, containing wild trout (brown trout locally), which are an average of 2lb in weight. These kind of fish dont put much of a bend in the rods, and certainly wont be leading to any self dilusion!

So in answer to your question earlier in the post, I’d say you were being a bit unfair about the generalisation in that the millions of sport fishermen all over the world are using rods to make fish look larger!

Thanks for the read,
Regards,
Tom

Disclaimer: I work at a company called Dabbleboard that makes whiteboarding software, and so it’s in our interest for people to choose the computer+software+projector combo over IWBs.