Growing up reading outdoor magazines, I recognized that women were usually portrayed as the disapproving, indifferent, or even openly hostile foil to the angling protagonist in most pieces. Fishing writers were are often quick to mention an ornery spouse, or a wife who took advantage of his time on the stream by going to a craft fair.
I always assumed growing up that there were no fishing chicks, and with a few exceptions that didn’t work out for me out West, I’ve been mostly correct. My wife enjoys fishing with me, but she’s never picked up a fly rod and doesn’t seem to have much desire to learn. I’m fine with that. Our fishing relationship consists of spinning gear, freshwater ponds and streams, or charter trips on the salt. When the going gets complicated, overly technical, or the time between fish stretches out, she’s content to find something else to do.
Gordon Wickstrom, the (Boulder, Colo.) Daily Camera‘s bow-tied outdoor sage, took his life in his hands the past few weeks to write about women who fish and he offered up some interesting observations. Being out West, Wickstrom was able to find one of those fly-fishing chicks and marry her, so he has a unique perspective on the issue, although one that I don’t completely agree with. He outlined a few of the advantages women have over men on the stream:
Women generally will be content to fish more close in, more intimately in the water near them. They will take it easier. While men are punching out hard, angry casts to as far as the new carbon rods will allow and then some, a woman finds a good fish within 40 feet.
Women will tend to fish longer in the same stretch of water — no frantic, three-mile tearing upstream for them. Too often there is something frantic or even hysterical in the way a man fishes. A woman’s work is more lyrical, gentler, more reflective and content. She neither stumbles nor falls in anxious determination to get to a better spot as does a man. She tends to be quiet in the way that Izaak Walton found to be an essential aim of angling.
Wickstrom takes a shot at the convention I described above in noting advances in women’s fishing gear, as well as their keener sensibilities on the water.
But whatever may be the case for women, it is no longer that of “the little woman” left sulking at home, the eternal scold and insensitive wife, seen in so much of the stupidly unfunny commercial angling cartoon humor.
I wouldn’t go as far to say that, but it’s nice to see some folks thinking about an ugly stereotype that has plagued fishing writing for decades.
Posted by gjhaze 
