Bent Rods:
The Compelling Comparison Between Fishing and Females
The simple and unquestionable truth about trying to catch a fish on rod and reel is that it’s all about putting the right type of bait on the right sort of gear in the right spot at the right time of day in the right conditions. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve dragged a perfectly presented prawn, or a freshly-off-the-shelves, over-priced, hard-bodied lure past the nose of some smart-arsed bloody fish only for it to be completely ignored. I’ve ripped hair out of my scalp as an ill-informed young angler, ignorantly throwing soft-plastic after soft-plastic at a bunch of fat blackfish off a rock-ledge near Bundeena and having each and every one of them swim about as if the colourful thing wobbling around in front of their lips didn’t exist. I now know that I can put that misfire down to inexperience (blackfish only usually eat green weed). It takes years of trial and error on the water to build up a knowledge base that you can draw upon to access the necessary information that will ensure your angling success. Unless, you happen to be that one bastard from every group of fishos that doesn’t’ really give two shits about fishing but always happens to end up catching all the fucking fish. You know who you are, you prick!
I can recall one extremely hot summer’s afternoon down at Bobbin Head, sight-casting beautifully hooked up baits at some fuck-off sized bream cruising around the jetty. Not a single bite! We persevered for hours; perseverance being the most apparent and useful tool in any keen angler’s arsenal of mental capabilities. The idea of catching some plate-sized, tasty table-fish was enough to maintain our rage for a while, but eventually the sun got the better of us and we left broken and defeated. If we hadn’t been able to see the fish, it wouldn’t have been so infuriatingly frustrating, but at least we found out that we were doing something very wrong. All we had to do was find out what the fuck that was.
The great thing about fishing is that when one is faced with such a dilemma there is an absolute abundance of material for you to keep in a pile next to the toilet, ready to read whenever your bowels feel the need to make a movement. Weekly, monthly and quarterly magazines contain pages upon pages of info you can engorge your skull with, expanding your internal database of tricks, tips, and techniques. The internet also holds endless amounts of reports, stories, and weather information from almost anywhere on Earth. Anything that may assist in the catching of fish is readily available for you to absorb, and it’ll help you catch anything from a trophy fish, to a feed of flathead for one.
I can’t say as much for something that has thwarted man for just as long, most probably even longer, as catching a fish - the art that is meeting, impressing and successfully seducing women. In this day and age of technological domination where instant gratification is so desperately sought after, trying to find a suitable partner can often seem like being placed right into the crux of a fast-paced, video-game deathmatch with very skilled players while you don’t even know how the controls work, or a high-stakes, professional poker game without understanding any of the rules. For me, personally, it feels like I’ve been thrown into the deep end of an extremely complicated and highly important job at a workplace full of co-workers with decades of experience, where I know absolutely nothing about the job and I’m really just floundering around aimlessly – pissing into the wind, so to speak.
A common angling experience I’ve been forced to endure is when you think you’ve got a good one, and then all of a sudden you’re slapped in the mouth with the rapid realisation that there’s nothing attached to the end of your line at all. This happens quite often when fishing. You’ll have your bait soaking away in the suds after cleverly hiding a hook inside it. You feel a bite. You strike. A short battle ensues before your line goes limp and you’re confronted with a big fat fuck all. The fish has spat the hook and swum away, leaving you swearing, shitty and frustrated, cursing the creature and trying to work out what bit of your gear you can blame.
Similarly, yet far more upsetting and frustrating is when this happens with a girl you like. You feel like you’ve done everything right. They’ve shown a great deal of interest in you. They may have even told you how interested they are in you, and done certain things of a sexual nature which would back these thoughts up. But then, out of the blue, radio silence. You’ve just been ghosted, my dear, poor, unfortunate friend.
If you’re unaware what ghosting is in this day and age, consider yourself quite lucky. Ghosting is when somebody decides to cease all manner of communication with somebody else for any number of reasons without exercising the expected and humanely normal decency of letting the other party know that they are going to stop talking to them. This leaves the ghostee wondering what the fuck has happened.
Was it something you’ve done?
Was it something you’ve said?
Did they meet someone else?
Is this person dead?
This sort of modern approach to communication (or lack thereof) is despicable and deplorable human behaviour and it really fucking sucks! I struggle to understand it, to be honest, yet it has happened to me countless times in the recent past. Apart from the fact that it almost always leads to wholeheartedly faulting oneself with many reasons for being an inadequate love interest, I personally tend to blame technology and the fact that people these days lack the general sense of civility and courtesy to adequately communicate their feelings and intentions – particularly if those feelings and intentions involve making them feel guilty or awkward or bad in any way. People tend to hide behind their devices, comforted by the fact that there’s not really any actual human interaction going on, merely a digital exchange of words that can be quite easily ignored or deleted. The truth is, however, that the feelings and emotions involved are just as real as any other human experience; it is just easier to disregard and discount them for your own best interest.
When something as horribly disconcerting happens as this to you, the standard response (apart from ripping yourself apart with self-deprecating, anxiety-driven, introspective queries) is to try to find help in the way friendly advice from a respected peer, or some written information from an experience and knowledgeable expert.
As far as literature is concerned, there is only a small amount of reading material about females and our constant search and desire for them. Unfortunately, the majority of this material proves to exist in ridiculously juvenile and immature men’s magazines that are hypocritically aimed at pre-pubescent boys. Men’s mags suck so much that it makes my soul cringe. The advice they give is targeted at horny teenagers who’ll inevitably end up pasting together the pages of their publication with pearl-jam anyway.
The rest of it, which is actually aimed at an adult, male audience, is some of the most shallow, superficial bullshit that merely focuses on how to get laid or to insincerely snare some unfortunate babe into your bed, apartment, car, or toilet stall.
Word of mouth seems to be where one may pick up the finer, more appropriate and most useful tips on these sorts of things. In the hunt for fish, that old fella who hangs out down the tackle-shop, tying flies and offering advice to customers in his well-worn waders and crocs is the type of bloke you want to talk to. Listening to him blabber on about the kingies in the harbor for ten minutes might just get you into some of the good oil. It’s unfortunate, though, that the ‘girl-guru’ equivalent doesn’t appear to actually exist in the same accessible way. Those men, if they do actually exist, must enjoy keeping a low profile, and I can understand why. They’re probably too damn busy getting amongst loads of sweaty, sexual acts of fornication and enjoying their fun, fulfilling, meaningful relationships that they don’t have time to give advice to novices like myself. If they did, there’d be fewer women available for them to woo at their whim and fancy.
For the most part, these men don’t really seem to hold presence in the world of a single-man’s sexual-warcraft. The men who most accurately do resemble a version of them, unfortunately, as far as females are concerned, happen to be those well-groomed, preened, pumped and primped, pretty-boy-looking, douche-bags who manage to pull the hottest skirt night after night, and then neglect to follow up and see them again. They run on small amounts of clear booze, bravado, bull-twang and bogus confidence, so I wouldn’t be worrying too heavily that these fuckwits aren’t often willing to exchange in any ‘professional banter’. It would exclusively consist of droning dialogue about themselves and their conquests. When they do, however, the usually unhelpful and often mysoginistically chauvinistic results look something like this. [Author’s note: only read if your stomach is strong enough to be able to easily digest large amounts of genuine shite.]
Fuck those guys! Leave them to their sexual exploits and self-delusions of grandeur. They can have all the one night stands with hot, young, slutty, promiscuous, head-fucking, mind-game playing sociopaths they want. They’ll eventually end up unsatisfied and alone, desperately trying to convince themselves that they’re happy and cool, and that everything was still all worth it. We can learn more by listening to that old bloke down the tackle shop.
Think about the most common phrase that’s uttered by a mate when you realise that the girl is gone: “there’s plenty more fish in the sea”. This phrase has helped us raise each other’s self-esteem and optimism for as long as women have had any sway in our relationships – which we can all agree has been a long fucking time. When a fish is lost the only thing you can do is rig back up again and get your bait right back out in the water. To the bloke who’s just been dropped like a bag of shit by the girl he has feelings for, this translates to: get over her. The world is full of sexy, amazing women. Losing the one that just got away isn’t going to ruin your life. You might even end up being better off without her.
That being said, most men will be able to tell you about their one that got away. Whether it be in fishing or in finding love, or both, everyone seems to have a white whale story up their sleeves. It’s an unfortunate truth that the human courting process can be just as gruesome, if not more, than mercilessly dragging a living creature by the lips with a jagged, barbed hook out of its home and into an atmosphere where they can’t breathe.
Ten percent of fishermen catch ninety percent of fish, and that’s because those ten-percenters have brains just bulging with fish-finding information and are keener than a strung-out junkie hanging out at Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s place! I’m not sure how the above figures would correlate with chick-pulling stats but I’m sure they must bear some sort of resemblance. You need to have your bait in the water to catch a fish, and you’ll never get a girlfriend if you don’t put yourself out there and put in any decent effort. The thing is, nowadays with apps like Tinder and Hapn you can meet a girl from you’re the comfort of couch or your shitter. You can spark up a friendly chat which may lead to a sly little flirt whilst up the shops, or down the beach, or even in the middle of a traffic jam – no time is now an inappropriate opportunity to acquire some potential prospects for pound-town.
Being at home in bed while it’s pissing down when you could be out fishing means you’ve decided that warmth and comfort is worth more than a bend in your rod. You just can’t have a sleep in and shelter from the ceaseless search for women, apart from those reclusive times we all have when we switch off and take some time for ourselves – and no, I don’t necessarily mean masturbation! Us males always have our metaphorical baits in the water, which is why most of us are constantly either expecting, or on the look-out for, a nibble. A nibble could be anything from a text message, online comment or phone call to an extended conversation, or a simple glance with less than five seconds eye-contact – it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that when you feel that nibble you react accordingly.
Some of us tend to remain quiet, sitting there with their hand feeling their rod, noticing the bumps on the line but preferring to remain silent and still so that if they end up blowing it they can divert the indignation and ridicule that failure can bring while in the presence of one’s peers.
The more seasoned angler always targets a certain species. They always know what they’re in for. With some fish, the proper technique may be to strike that fucker as soon as you feel anything bite. If you feel a pull, you rip that rod up like it’s nobody’s business and you pump-the-fuck-away! In most situations, this method’s incorrect. You’ll usually just end up pulling your pilly right out of their mouth. It may always be possible to jag something as your hook tears through the water column on its way back to the boat, but then there’s also the risk of snapping your rod, and let me tell you, nothing makes you feel like more of a dumb-cunt.
Peacocking tends to work in some blokes pursuit of poon, as it has for many fishermen whose tackle-boxes resemble Oxford Street during Mardis Gras. Flamboyant and flashy lures attract fish very well. Flamboyant and flashy shit seems to attract anything, apparently. If you go out rocking your mum’s old woollen sweater from the eighties featuring whack, multi-coloured, zig-zag patterns on it, with tights, high-top sneakers and sharp, shapes shaved into your head, you’ll most likely attract a shit-truck-load of attention too. The thing is you’ve got to be able to own it. If it’s not you, you’re going to stick out like even more of a sore dick. You’ve got to embody the flamboyant and flashy attitude that your gear lends itself to. I wouldn’t bring a dildo to a knife fight, and I certainly wouldn’t take my fourteen-foot Alvey surf rod and size 10/0 hooks down to the jetty on the creek. Know how to use your gear. It’s not cheap, so try not to leave it stuck under a submerged log or wrapped around a mangrove tree.
Some fellas drink too much an end up with nothing – and this analogy works quite literally for both fishing and men on the singles market. I don’t know if you’ve ever met a girl when you’re really drunk and ended up kissing her, you’ve gone to the bar, or the loo, or somewhere, come back, and you can’t remember what the fuck she looks like. I have, a couple of times, and if snapping your rod makes you feel like a dumb-cunt, then doing this makes you feel like a severely, mentally-retarded, gaping, blue-whale’s baby-cannon. These girls were probably metres from me, watching me sip my fresh beer or scratch my fresh arse-crack, wondering ‘what the fuck is that dickhead doing?’ Girls, I do apologise on behalf of all males, and myself of course, if you happen to be one of those poor babes left to dance by themselves – I am sincerely and genuinely sorry! You know you were probably better off for it anyway. If I was that pissed that I’d forgotten your face from minutes earlier, I doubt I would’ve been the most eloquent of humans during that encounter, and certainly would’ve struggled to get Ol’ Plugger up and into action if things heated up anyway.
I’ve even been on a pseudo blind date where two nights earlier I’d me this girl and made out with her, but ended up getting so trolleyed that the next day I had merely the vaguest recollection of kissing someone due to a taste on my lips and a number in my phone. ‘Julia Growyourbeard’ was what she’d saved it as. So, yes, it looked like we already had some in-jokes that I was completely unaware of as well. It wasn’t your run-of-the-mill blind date, it was just that I was so blind when we met that I had totally no memory of what she looked like. When meeting up with her I sat strategically in the corner of the pub so that when anyone walked through either one of the doors I would stare at them until they either looked away or smiled at me in recognition. It worked, but the date turned out pretty bland. She was a Kiwi, quite nice, but boring – not really my cup of tea. She tested me on my in-joke knowledge, or lack thereof, and continually complained about the fact that I’d shaved. Apparently, I’d promised her
that I’d grow a beard the night we met. By running my mouth and putting out promises like a politician I’d dug myself in a bit of hole. Don’t feed them lies. Anything more than the standard little white lies that strangers often tell each other as a way of masking their inner-oddities and insecurities will over-feed them. And full fish do not bite!
Don’t over-feed yourself too much booze either. We all know that boats are made to go down, but why speed up the process. A drunk captain is like a cock-cutter – it just should not exist. If you aren’t running a boat, or on a boat for that matter, that doesn’t give you a green light to suck piss until the esky’s dry. Sure have a few, that’s what fishing is all about. It’s the only sport where you can be doing any combination of sleeping, drinking, smoking, talking on the phone, listening to the radio, sun-tanning, farting and stretching-the-legs, all at the same time. But that doesn’t mean we should exploit this unique facet of our beloved lifestyle and get so pissed we have no interest in fishing anymore. When somebody becomes more interesting in skipping stones across the water than fishing on a fishing trip, I think it’s time to go home boys.
Just don’t go at it like a bull at a gate. Take your time, examine your surroundings, know your enemy and choose an adequate amount of gear accordingly. Women may not be as simple as fishing, but their complexities draw vast comparisons. The search is endless, desperate, scary and goddamn tricky, and don’t we just love to eat them! We can always pop in to the local tackle-shop, emptying our wallets on an array of new gear and hopefully helpful hints about specific species and their movements. Unfortunately, things just aren’t as simple in our quests for companionship. We can only heighten our chances by being prepared with a contextually apt amount of knowledge, exuding an air of confidence resultant of countless disappointments, projecting the right amount of enthusiasm at the right times, and it may help to not say weird shit too. I know that sounds like your mum preparing you for your first job interview, but you know it’s true.
Experience is everything. Get yourself out there, out of your comfort zone and throw everything you’ve got at them. You won’t be successful every time, if we were it wouldn’t be an issue, would it? But it will work every so often, and that’s good enough for me.
It doesn’t hurt to throw out a bit of burley too, but be frugal; you don’t want to overfeed those fish!
I wish you all some nice bends in your rods, mi amigos. Godspeed.
26TH FEBRUARY 2014