I am 37 and am as excited about fishing as I was thirty years ago. I started fishing on American Lake and remember lying on my belly for hours hand-lining rock bass and perch. My parents used to have to yell at me to come in for meals. Of course that attitude progressed to salt water piers, salt water boats, fly fishing creeks and rivers, lake fishing, guiding in Cambell River, etc ad nauseum.
The desire to fish for steelhead came from an issue of Salmon Trout Steelheader that I had come accross. The stories relayed the difficulty and that fueled my compulsion to prove to my dad that I had suprassed his ability ( he was a great fisherman and had travelled the world, but had never tried river fishing) Consequently when I was 14 my mom started dropping me off on the Nisqually at 6:00am and picking me up at dark. I would walk the river all day trying to catch my first steelhead- a compulsion that still drives the "just one more last cast syndrome." It took three years for me to catch that first fish and I will never forget it. I had snagged up on the previous cast and forgot to loosen my drag. After I set the hook I had my hands full and made a lucky recovery.
I got my first driftboat at 15, an old wood handbuilt and have had a complete flotilla since. For me, river fishing is the most rewarding because it is a dynamic changing enviroment. the drift is never completely the same twice and every year, after the winter storms, that first drift is an unsolved mystery. The playing field has been leveled and the score board wiped clean.
Today I get just as much satisfaction watching some one else catch a fish as handleling the rod myself. Now it is about finding the fish rather than catching them. The drift is like an Easter egg hunt. I want to figure out where they are and see that take down or feel the strike in the rod. I am additcted to the sensation of knowing a fish is there... right before you set the hook... that surge of electricity traveling down down your arm- your brain telling your arm to rear back and drive that hook home. After that it is all downhill. I am just as excited about a missed strike as a landed fish. It is all about finding them.
So I am slowly working to start guiding. Not full time, I don't want to make my passion my work, just once a week or so to share what I have learned over the course of my "carreer" so to speak.
It seems odd that in this thread we are willing to confess the reasons for our insanity to an anonomous audience and the only justification I have is nobody else would understand except an equally corrupted soul. Even if we fight for first water during the day, that is the common bond that brings us together at the end of the day at the launch, the diner bar or whatever.
So I to try answer the question again, I am still trying to figure that out for myself.
And yet i still find myself going everyday that i can.
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