I go fishing quite a lot in the summer and fall particularly. I've been doing it most of my life and yet, I'm not one of those people that focuses on having an expensive rod and while I do have some lures that look like small fish with tons of hooks coming out of them, I don't really even like to bother with that.
I have friends who spend hundreds of dollars on a single lure and they go fishing with me and catch the same fish that I do, sometimes smaller ones. So mostly I think that entire industry might be useful in very specific situations, but for the most part it is just advertising telling people to buy stuff they don't need.
This is a simple free-to-use picture from Etsy, but it caught my eye because other than the fact that there isn't a giant cooler of beer on that boat, that is what me and my pals get up to when we go fishing. Well, that is if we bother to use a boat at all. Most of the time we just sit on the dock so that we don't have to lug a bunch of crap too and from the boat.
No, that is not how we NC rednecks roll. Our primary mission in our fishing endeavors isn't really even to catch any fish. We just like getting out somewhere quiet with some friends and kicking back with some cold beers and shooting the breeze. Every 30 minutes or so someone will catch something and we all join in celebrating their victory, sometimes we'll take a picture of the fish and then we always release it. We don't go fishing for food, we have grocery stores for that and often we are not really sure about the laws regarding if we are ever allowed to keep the fish... hell, we aren't even sure if we are allowed to go fishing at some of the places we go to.
Things don't really work like that here in New Bern unless you go to the tourist places. We do not go to the tourist places. Over the years of living here we all just kind of know these back roads that lead to the same river and tributaries that the tourists get to, but we don't have to deal with crowds or park officials in what we do.
We are probably on private property but it's not posted, so we will keep doing this until someone tells us off.
People say there is a perfect way to get a nightcrawler on a hook but mostly we don't bother with such things. We just try not to get our fingers on the hook as well. We sit in the shade we sit on those low riding lawn chairs and maybe we'll have the radio playing low in the truck.
It seems so stupid to some people but honestly man, I can't really think of anything I would rather be doing. The best part is that aside from the cost of the beer, which is minimal since all of us prefer cheap lite beer, this doesn't really cost us anything. Imagine that? Something that you genuinely enjoy doing that doesn't cost very much.
I'm afraid that a lot of this is kind of lost on the younger generation. Two of my regular fishing buds have 4 children, 3 boys between the two of them, and none of their kids have ever expressed even the slightest interest in going fishing with us, which is a shame.
Maybe it is something that comes with older age but I fear that the real reason is because kids these days don't really want to do anything outdoors unless they can get a reel or an instagram out of it and I'm afraid there just aren't many photo ops at outings like ours, it isn't very glamorous.
But for about 5 hours every couple of weekends me and the boys, 1 of which I have known since I have childhood memories, get to go out and be "free." I don't ever see myself getting tired of this peaceful, wonderful, and free hobby.
