As Fly Fishers We Have to Guard OurSelves From a Sense of Superority:

Back in the 80s when I really got into fly fishing for trout I had a sense of being on a mission. And that mission was to convert every bait and spin fisher to a fly fisher. This mission was real in that there was a religious component to it. I was good at selling the notion that fly fishing was superior to all other forms of fishing.

I did this while guiding and while I was a teacher at school and with folks at church and with family. I loved to tell people how much more rewarding and fun fly fishing was compared to the other forms of fishing. I grew to hate big lures with those stupid treble hooks and fish swallowing bait hooks. Yuck.

And of course like any good salesman I sometimes had to push it and beg. "Please let me teach you how to fly fish. Once you catch a fish on a fly you will never go back to picking up a spin casting rod again."  And usually I was right. 

But here is the catch, fly fishing can be so much fun, so rewarding and so productive that we end up hurting a lot of fish simply because we we catch a lot. We catch tons,  When we become good at something it is easy to become addicted. Part of the addiction is the sense of superiority that wells up inside of us knowing that we have mastered an art. Or at the very least, we figured it out. 

I remember wanting people to watch me. It was like I was wearing a sign on my hat or shirt, "Look at me."   

In my last years of guiding I shied away from that kind of thing. In fact I started to hate being noticed. I didn't want anyone to know I was guiding.