We recently drove up to Scotland for a three-day fishing trip. And it was a long way; not Highlands of Scotland sort of long, but long enough. With a couple of stops for refuelling (both car and ourselves) the door-to-door journey time was something like eight hours.
Settling In
We hunkered down in the self-catering accommodation that came with the fishing. Wine and food had been secured; gear was assembled.
And we fished pretty hard. It being October, it wasn’t the sort of summer fishing when one feels duty bound to nip out for an hour-and-a-half before breakfast. We fished from nine o’clock each morning until sundown - barring a pretty expansive lunch break in one of my favourite fishing huts.
A Big Fat Blank
The end result? A big fat blank. And not just for me. None of us so much as touched a fish — not a pull, a pluck, a bang, or a tug. Zip.
“To a non-angler, a blank is failure. To us, it’s part of the story.”
And yet the break was a lot of fun. I’d be back there like a shot, even if the result did turn out to be the same.
It’s Not (Only) About the Catch
This is just one of the aspects of fishing that’s so hard to explain to a non-angler. They think (perhaps understandably) that the sole aim of going fishing is to land a fish. In their eyes, a trip in which that doesn’t occur is an abject failure.
But we know better, do we not?
I am not for one second suggesting that I don’t relish the take, the fight, slipping a net under a fish I’ve tried, long and hard, to catch, because that is (in an over-arching sense) the reason I am there. But there’s all that other stuff… and it’s all that other stuff that makes the trip.
The Real Rewards
Fishing with good mates in beautiful places; seeing an osprey, or a peregrine, or an otter; throwing out a decant cast repeatedly for an hour or two; just listening to the sounds of the river and the nature that’s all around you.
And then finishing the day with wine, home cooked food and increasingly inane conversation. These are memories we cherish.
Logging Life, Not Just Fish
And this is why we’ve introduced the facility to log a Blank Record on finScribe. From the start, we always wanted the app to be a record of users’ fishing journeys through life: not simply a list of fish caught, but a bank of memories from which one can learn, yes, but also to reminisce, mull over the good times - fish or no fish.
That’s what we’re using finScribe for.
Log your next blank.
Not every trip ends with a fish — but every one tells a story. Start logging with finScribe, the fishing logbook app.
