The Element of Luck

THE ELEMENT OF LUCK

When somebody sees me fishing and asks, “Have any luck?” – and it happens all the time, I either ignore them, or respond with a pat response like, “There’s no such thing as luck,” or “Not with you here.”

Luck is for people who don’t know how to fish.

You can go out fishing for the first time in your life with a piece of hot dog on the end of a hook and catch a keeper striper, and that would certainly be lucky, but I’ve never had any luck catching fish. I make it happen through diligence and hard working experience.

Catching fish is not a sport with me, it’s a job, and I’m the utmost professional.

Webster defines luck as “to prosper or succeed through chance or good fortune; to come to something desirable by chance.”

Bullshit. I make my luck happen through hard, self-disciplined work. No pain, no gain. Discipline is the number one factor in Quality Fishing. Learn by doing, making mistakes, and trying as hard as possible not to repeat them.

Quality fishing demands discipline, and without it there is chaos, and the fish wins when the forces of chaos reign.

Discipline is consistency, and in order to establish consistency everything must run like a precision instrument. What a pain in the ass it is to tie up all the rigs I need before hand, so that no extra effort is required at Prime Time. What a pain in the ass it is to disassemble my reels, inspect them for anything that might fail, lubricate them and reassemble them, and to prepare my baits in advance of a trip.

You must become like a soldier at this. Many mistakes have cost me countless numbers of fish and countless fishless hours, but they also taught me discipline. I may not look like I’m disciplined, and I still make mistakes, from forgetting to tighten the spool tension screw to leaving bait out a little too long, but in the end, you can bet your ass that the job is done when you have a Keeper Striper flapping around at your feet. And that’s what I make happen.

Having no more formal education than not finishing tenth grade, most of my knowledge did not come from school, but from personal experiences, mainly from being on the road or on the river most of my life.