"When a trip comes apart on somebody, it's always, always
because of false expectations," Silvio Calabi said
recently. "People arrive at a destination with a mindset
- not just about the size and quantity of fish, but about the
food, the amount of game animals they're going to see, how
crowded the fishery is." An experienced traveler and
expert fly-fisherman as well as editor in chief and associate
publisher of Fly Rod & Reel and Fly Tackle
Dealer magazines, Calabi knows what he's talking about.
My experience certainly corroborates his.
After reading the outfitter's or booking agent's
promotional hype about the place (not to mention the
breathless prose in the outdoor magazines, almost certainly
written by nonpaying junketeers), it's hard not to arrive at
a fishing destination with pumped-up expectations. I mean, if
you didn't expect great fishing, why would you have spent so
much time and money on the trip?
It's okay to be optimistic about a fishing trip; just be a
realistic optimist. Unless you're a real piscatorial shut-in,
one who's experienced little variety and a lot of shutouts in
your fly-fishing, you can't realistically expect that a trip
to some angling Mecca halfway around the world will provide
the fishing of a lifetime. The trip of a
lifetime, maybe. But the fishing? There are simply too many
variables to count on having great fishing, no matter where
you are heading: weather, timing, your abilities and skills
under the conditions at hand, even luck.
Yes, luck. After we've tucked a few seasons under our
belt, we like to think that luck no longer plays a role in
our fishing, but it does. The first time I went fishing
abroad - on a writers' junket to the Scottish Highlands and
the Orkney Islands - luck conspired with the calendar.
Mid-May in such high latitudes, we expected the water to
be cold and the salmon run to be spotty. And they were. But
who could have predicted weather too hot and sunny for good
fishing, two days out of three, that early, that far north?
To make a long story short, nobody caught a salmon. But at
least we all caught trout. All but one of us, that is. The
one who went completely fishless the whole trip was probably
the most experienced person among us, insofar as fly-fishing
and trout fishing are concerned. You'd recognize the byline
for sure, but I won't embarrass him further.
Lady Luck can be fickle and perfidious. Or she can smile
on those least deserving. I hadn't yet learned to fly-cast
but somehow managed to catch the first fish of the trip, a
brown trout from Loch Swannay that turned out to be half the
first day's total catch. Believe me, it was dumb luck. Skill
had nothing to do with it. Nothing.
Summing up the Scottish Highlands and Islands experience:
The weather had been perverse (as it so often is when fishing
is involved), we got there before most of the fish did, my
fly-fishing skills (virtually nonexistent) were not up to the
challenges, and luck dealt out some pretty strange hands. As
I would come to learn with more fishing-travel experience, it
was a pretty typical fly-fishing trip.
The least experienced fly-fisherman on that trip to
Scotland, I was the least disappointed. My expectations were
vague and, except for the one about catching a salmon, mostly
exceeded by the particulars of the experience: seeing the
Scottish countryside, watching birds, learning about flies,
meeting a lot of interesting people, discovering single-malt
Scotches. But I think some of the others were disappointed.
Expectations and disappointment are closely related, and
mostly mirrored: High expectations beget high disappointment,
unreasonable expectations result in unreasonable
disappointment.
Go anywhere in the world expecting to shoot fish in a
barrel, and you are setting yourself up for a major
disappointment. Odds are the fishing won't be that good at
any given time and place. If it is, it'll be too easy to be
much fun.
From hard-won experience, I can tell you that no
fishing trip ever turns out exactly the way you thought it
would. Sometimes the fishing is better than expected, but
usually it's worse. Every famous fishing Mecca has its off
days and weeks, weather can turn the fishing on its ear in a
minute, and both people and machinery sometimes fail at the
tasks assigned them. As the Scottish poet Robert Burns so
memorably put it, "The best laid schemes o'mice and
men/Gang aft a-gley."
If the fishing isn't off or the weather uncooperative, you
almost certainly can count on something else going wrong at
some point during the trip. Sometimes a lot of something else. I've learned that "no problem" is the last
thing you want to hear before or during a fishing trip,
because it usually means the person you are talking to (a.)
doesn't understand the question, (b.) doesn't know the
answer, or (c.) is pretty sure you don't want to hear the
answer.