Fishing: Patience and Preparation

I wouldn't consider myself an avid outdoorsman, but I am definitely an enthusiast. As a child, fishing was a connection to my father and my grandfather. I admit, as a young man, I did not see in fishing what they did but as I age into their position, the murky water is beginning to clear. For starters I suppose, I was not exactly the most patient little skipper. As we sat on those boats, I dreaded the seconds between the exciting action of the "hunt", but what I failed to see was that this was only half of the game. The actual hunt, or larger picture of fishing is that the excitement doesn't lie just in the physical labor of menial reeling, but rather in the deception of the fish.

It is incredible the lengths career fisherman will go to stage and lure fish. The most eye-opening experience any amateur fisherman can have in my opinion, is going on a fishing charter. Through this I learned that fishing is much more than throwing a line in the water and rolling the dice.

Pictured above is a fish that I pulled in on Lake Ontario. Unfortunately, an expert fisherman staged the lure and set me up for success so I cannot take all of the credit.

The key to this success was however, not completely leaving the fate of the lure to chance. Considering the tides, wind speed, local weather patterns and currents, the fisherman made many calculations in order to ensure the most educated moves would be made for his valued customers. The captains goal, as he would tell us, was to minimize variables. Using probes, he measured water temperature and current speed at different depths. Taking these into account, he strategically placed lures of different shape, size and color at different depths around known salmon and trout "hot spots". Just when you thought this was impressive enough he and his mate further increased our odds through a spectacular feat of organization and rigging TEN poles behind the boat.

Other than being an extremely relaxing day out on the water, our boat of four pulled in a decent days work. I am not sure if it is the disconnect from outside society or the pride of primitive ways (pulling the fish out of the water, into a cleaning station and onto your plate for dinner), but, what I do know is that fishing will always be a sacred activity for me.

Here is a picture of our days work:

An assortment of lake trout and king salmon on a charter that we did through Midway Charters in Sandy Creek, NY. The link to their page is in the image above.

Human Nature: A Surprisingly Natural Experience

Preceding modern natural science was an empire of natural philosophy. Lacking necessary tools to explore the realm beyond the eye, philosophers used the minds eye to analyze, assess and explain our strange situation here on earth.

Natural Philosophy: reasoning to describe and explain nature

Natural Science: qualitative data and description to explain nature

The meaning of all of this is that when I, a lowly undergraduate, was selecting classes, my thought was that anything existing in the philosophical domain would be of no use to my interests. How could pondering lofty theoreticals assist my love of qualitative truth?

This question defined that class for me, and although it was taught with the focus of human nature, I often found myself drifting in and out actual nature and real life applications of philosophical implementation. For example, in class we discussed actions. So, if you can acknowledge something happening as an action, then you must also acknowledge something not happening as an action. It is impressive to then think of the possibilities of things the that are not happening. Which in contrast makes the world we live in today a generally boring place when superimposed on the infinite possibilities that are afforded by our minds. With deeper thought you may consider why things are not happening versus those that are and be comforted by the (also generally boring) truth that the world, for the most part, works in rational ways. 

My favorite example:

http://www.naturalisme.dk/blog/wp-content/uploads/angraecum-sesquipedale.jpg

Charles Darwin, a naturalist and geologist, in 1862 deducted that if we live in a just, rational world then the only reason that a series of orchids in Madagascar would have such impressively deep nectaries is because there exists somewhere an animal of which can receive it's nectar. He theorized (on the observation of the orchid alone) that there in fact must be a moth (a known pollinator of the orchid) that has evolved an extraordinarily long tongue in order to reach the nectar. It was not until 1992 (~150 years later) that that very moth was observed thus confirming Darwin's deductions. 

http://blog.hmns.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Giant-sphinx-moth-original.jpg

It is this story that is very powerful to me. On numbers alone science is not complete. Modern day academia needs visionaries and chance takers with progressive thinking to delve the unknown. Without reasoning and inquiry we will never discover what we don't know.

I do not say this often but, the liberal arts core has been a great service to my academic career and has shed some light on my academic prejudice. By "forcing" me to take humanities I have been given a perspective not usually visited in the "hard" or physical sciences.

Information pertaining to the Moth Story can be found HERE