It doesn't make sense to me how anyone could call fishing a hobby. I mean, how boring must your life be that you find fishing more interesting. My many attempts at meditation had proven that I'm just not cut out for activities that require me to sit still and not think about anything. I suppose I can understand why this hobby mostly appeals to men and not as many women. Men have this constant need to 'retreat to their caves' and 'zone out'. Don't blame me if you think this is sexist; blame Dr. John Gray who wrote Men Are from Mars. 😅
The other thing that I don't get is fishing for sport, in which you release the fish after catching it. Have you heard of a stupider sport than that? You're still hurting the fish, aren't you? Might as well kill it to feed someone hungry. At least the fish doesn't die in vain, and you haven't just wasted your time for nothing.
Also, I was scared of fishing. I had heard of how easy it was to accidentally puncture your finger--instead of the bait--with the hook. And if that happened, it wouldn't be very easy to remove it without taking some of your flesh along. One of my mom's friends once had a fishing hook caught in his eye because he stood too close behind someone who was casting a line. He had to wear a glass eye for the rest of his life.
Anyway, like it or not, if I were to dedicate more time to being outdoors on my own, at some point I'm going to have to learn to be self-sufficient. I needed to learn how to fish.
On our camping trip in Naranag, Kashmir, our tour guide had brought along his fishing gear. He introduced me to the fishing rod, hook, bobber and sinker. We were going to use earthworms as live bait, but I made him attach them to the hook himself. There was no way I was going to touch those squirmy little things. Next time, I will just go for artificial lures, or shrimps, or cat food or anything that is not a worm.
We used an open-face spinning reel. That means I had to flip open the bail to release the line from the spool, and close it to lock the line before retrieving. Because the river current was strong, we were not doing the sit-and-wait method of fishing. Instead, we had to cast the line and reel it in immediately. And repeat.
I tried it a few times and handed it back to him. I think fishing, like golfing, needs a certain amount of poise and grace, which I obviously didn't have:
I'm not sure if we were just unlucky or our tour guide had been bluffing about his fishing skill all along. We had learnt not to trust anything he said. When he saw how fascinated I was with the goats, cows and horses we met at our campsite, he quickly claimed to be a true animal lover too. Then, in a separate attempt to impress us, he boasted about how he always went deer-hunting and how good he was at it. It sounded like something an abusive husband would say: "Yah, I love my wife. That's why I hit her." Anyway, we didn't catch anything.
Our horseman cum mountain guide took over after that with his own set of live baits. Just several minutes later, he came back with a small rainbow trout, which he grilled. It turned out to be the tastiest fish my partner and I had ever had.
Here are pictures of me posing with the fish, while the tour guide pretended to cheer.
I love animals, but I'm not a vegetarian (yet). I guess that makes me as much of a hypocrite as my tour guide was. But for now, I'll stick to my omnivorism, as long as I don't have to watch the hunting and butchering of the animal I'm about to eat. The fish was already dead when the horseman brought it to us. I think I would have been traumatized had I really been the one to catch it.
