#1. In high school I never took typing as a class. I feared it would lower my GPA which would harm my college scholarship applications and I had inspirations of being “the Boss” after college. Back then (the 80’s) boss’s had secretaries and secretaries did all the typing so why take a class I would not need in the future.
During my 20+ years of corporate life I ended up on the computer task force which phased in laptops when they first appeared. The first ones were big and heavy enough to serve as anchors for a bay boat, but I digress. Eventually everyone in management and the sales force got one so we could communicate with each other across the country with something new called “email.” Needless to say we all ended up doing our own typing.
Currently, my 2 finger “hunt and peck” system of typing is tolerable. Not exactly lightening speed, but the built in spell checkers take the brunt of my caveman style of typing. With ease I can find the tide tables, weather conditions, aerial photos of the bays, and fly fishing websites.
#2. I used to have a boat, now I have an ex-wife. Relationships connected with a 7X tippet do not last long. I now own a kayak. With a boat, your physical condition is not too big a factor. As long as you could get into the boat at the boat ramp, your limitation and cruising range was the capacity of your gas tank. With a kayak the limitation of your cruising range is your physical shape. Endurance, stamina, muscle tone, etc are now factors for former couch potato/boat drivers. I now spend the winters keeping in shape instead of watching fishing shows on TV. My diet has also changed as Cokes and Twinkies have been replaced by bottled water and gravel-gritted-granola bars.
#3. “SUV” is Spanish for gas guzzling behemoth. I have owned 4 in the past and currently have one that goes through a full gas tank just by going to the local grocery store a couple times a week. With almost $4.00 per gallon these are not the most popular vehicles in the classifieds or as trade-ins, so getting rid of it is not promising. At one of my kayak classes, a young lady arrived in a Volkswagen Beetle with a kayak strapped on top. Of course we all had a laugh as the kayak was longer than her vehicle. On second thought maybe the car was strapped to the kayak. Now the laugh is on me as that car no doubt gets triple the gas mileage that I get.
#4. Being a photographer for over 30 years, cameras, lens, and accessories tend to pile up. Color slides, via film cameras, is what every fishing magazine desired until the advent of the high mega pixel digital SLR. A high end film camera body would or could last many years if taken care of properly. Now they collect dust on shelves and are valued pennies on the dollar of their original purchase price. New digital bodies are introduced every year supplanting your current model with a bigger, faster, and more expensive one. Of course you have to keep up with the Garcia’s by buying the new model and this is after you have finally figured out all of the buttons on the old one. There is no end to this. The good thing is that rolls of film have been replaced by memory cards which are highly reusable. Now electrons get horribly inconvenienced, but not harmed when I take a picture.
#5. I like to eat fish. Fishing was supposed to be a way of putting food occasionally on the table or at least that was some of the reasoning for buying a boat (see above). Yes, conservation is good and the tight restrictions on redfish during the late 80’s and early 90’s did help the specie rebound. I have no problem with that. Mindsets do change and sometimes change for the better. Now I go a year or so without keeping anything. I might take a picture of it or kiss it, but I let it go. Before I retired from being a kayak guide, I considered the fish my employees and I told my clients that keeping a red was bad for the morale of the school. In most cases they consented and let it go after a photo was taken. Today I consider the redfish (and specs and flounder and Spanish mackerel and tarpon, etc.) my friends and as friends are wont to do, we say “hi” when we see each other from time to time when our paths cross at the end of my fly line.
A fishy life is not a destination but a journey now done with rechargeable batteries. Last night my two fingers surfed the internet looking for a hybrid vehicle that runs on electrolytes or something like that. My obsolete digital camera lies next to a package of bottled water that came from Fiji and a stack of gravel-gritted-granola bars that taste like the cardboard box it came in. My garage is full of rods, more than I will ever use in one lifetime and if I eat a redfish, chances are that it came from a redfish farm and not a miscalculated cast.
