Followers of fly fishing periodicals will know that Fly Culture is no more, ceasing publication late last year. The editor, Pete Tyjas, was offered the editorship of Trout & Salmon when Andrew Flitcroft retired. Apparently a dream job for him, FC had to go. The new editor has made some changes to the format although these are relatively minor. Early editions under the Tyjas editorship flagged ‘new writers’ on the front page — new, that is, to T&S but typically those who used to write for FC, most of whom are guides. In the last issue I’ve seen (July), the majority of article authors are either guides or part of the T&S team. An old stalwart, Paul Proctor, regularly dispenses advice to the great river of incompetent anglers out there. Apparently ‘smoke literally pours from our ears’ when we get to the river, such is our fevered intellectual activity. Must remember to check my rear-view mirror next trip.
Pete has often presented his environmental credentials, though as I’ve observed before, he is not entirely consistent. In the July editorial he says he stops fishing when the water gets too warm on the grounds of fish welfare. A commendable attitude but at odds with his enthusiasm for faraway fishing trips. He gives space to an article on one of these by Brett O’Connor. Apart from being a fishing guide (with regulation beard), he used to help out with Fly Culture, but the day job is ‘executive creative director’ — i.e. highly paid ad-man. I point out the pay bit because that’s how he can afford all the foreign fishing trips he mentions in passing. The article in question is all about a doozy of a holiday, as the Americans might say (appropriate as the package is offered by an American holiday company).
Argentina is a long way, at least 14 hours to Buenos Aires sardined inside an aircraft with a head rest in your face. Mind you, Brett could probably afford corporate class. Cost is around $11,000 a bit over £8,000. That doesn’t include flights or overnight accommodation on the way there. Five days fishing for over ten grand and sharing a room with a stranger, probably an overweight American who snores like a warthog? Er . . . Then think of the flight’s CO2 emissions, something like a quarter of the average UK resident’s annual carbon expenditure. In case anyone’s forgotten, those emissions are the reason Pete and the rest of us have to curtail summer fishing. And all for a modest chance of catching an outsize chinook salmon, itself a foreign transplant to the region.
That’s the price, monetary and environmental, so what about the article? Well for a creative executive it’s not very creative. Patagonia is from writings and TV programmes a remarkable place. Yet O’Connor struggles to convey any of the scenery he fishes in, resorting to ‘breathtaking in its beauty’, ‘almost overwhelming’ — too overwhelming it seems to avoid ad-man’s copy. Glaciers are all around with ‘icebergs freshly carved [sic] from ancient glaciers’. One imagines a giant Gaucho riding into the mountains with a chisel. He means ‘calved’. Naturally he makes no mention of the reasons for all this calving, the fast-melting ancient glaciers caused by global warming. Pained fishing tackle is a staple of the fishing article and Brett spares us none of the suffering. When he latches on to a monster his ‘reel erupted’. Incidentally, in a précised version on the Orvis website, his reel ‘exploded’. I’d ask for my money back if I were him.
So it goes on, ending with the netting of an unfeasibly large fish, a kind of frankensalmon. On the web piece he calls it an Atlantic chinook. I thought that chinooks are Pacific salmon, but then I realised that these introduced fish now swim a river that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. So the fish-moving meddlers have created an Atlantic Pacific salmon.
I suppose the article is no worse than the usual fare that Trout & Salmon or other magazines dish up. But I have to wonder whether Brett O’Connor, while he’s flogging stuff to the consumer, or planning his next round-the-globe holiday in pursuit of an introduced fish that takes very many hours and very much money to catch, gives any regard to the real cost to our fishing, the planet and all its living inhabitants, most of whom have never heard of a king salmon. And I wonder whether Pete Tyjas has any sense of the contradiction between lamenting environmental decline and publishing articles on his mates’ activities that are helping to bring this about.
The Secret Angler 