"Posting About Fishing Hurts Your Professional Image, Chuck ..."
- Charles Rathmann
- Jul 28
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 28
Admittedly, nobody has ever said this to me, in as many words or otherwise ...
... but I am not a guide. I am not an outfitter. I have zero interest in making even part of my living from fishing. My work in software and technology for construction, the built environment, and industry has nothing to do with fishing.
While my work involves technology for man-made settings, once I pull on the waders and pick up the 3-weight or 4-weight fly rod, I venture into places man has not touched, or if he has, the traces have long since faded. The rugged hills of the Wisconsin Driftless were once clear cut. They are now reforested apart from the grassy goat prairies on their southwest faces, and a layer of silt in many streams, formerly hilltop soil, is the only reminder. Technology has only so much to contribute to this venture, and to the way of thinking of many of us, is a hindrance rather than a help.
Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, wrote of fly fishing a difficult lie by drifting a dry fly downstream between alder bushes and setting the hook to the sound of the take on the surface:
"I have the impression that the American sportsman is puzzled; he doesn’t understand what is happening to him. Bigger and better gadgets are good for industry, so why not for outdoor recreation? It has not dawned on him that outdoor recreations are essentially primitive, atavistic; that their value is a contrast-value; that excessive mechanization destroys contrasts by moving the factory to the woods or to the marsh ...
"I do not pretend to know what is moderation, or where the line is between legitimate and illegitimate gadgets. It seems clear, though, that the origin of gadgets has much to do with their cultural effects. Homemade aids to sport or outdoor life often enhance, rather than destroy, the man-earth drama; he who kills a trout with his own fly has scored two coups, not one. I use many factory-made gadgets myself. Yet, there must be some limit beyond which money-bought aids to sport destroy the cultural value of sport."
Low Tech Trout Fishing
In my case, the spring creeks that wind between bluffs in the Driftless make gadgets just one more thing to carry across a marsh, through wooded areas, over barbed wire fences, up and down banks, wading through current and pushing through dense vegetation. The walleye fisherman or the bass tournament competitor is loaded down with a boat that weighs a thousand pounds, fish locators, GPS-controlled trolling motors, shallow water anchors, live wells, even controversial tech like forward-facing sonar that turns fishing into a video game-like exercise.
Even doodads that fly fishermen wear dangling from their vest have proven problematic. They catch on things, the fly line wraps around them in a gust of wind--less is more. My flyfishing vest is used less and less, and a small bag on the wading belt that holds my net is usually all I require.
Stripped of technical encoutrements, I have to focus on physical observation. How clear is the water? What obstructions create current seams and riffles that provide shelter from current, making for a good feeding lie? What deeper water and springs offer shelter and coolness as the day warms?
Maybe I turn over some stones to see what insect nymphs and other organisms are present that can be emulated by a fly, or watch for adults coming off the surface or in the streamside flora.
The fishing technology itself is ancient, with modern refinements. The graphite fly rod and polymer fly line are more performant than the split cane bamboo and silk line Leopold used, but the fly patterns and materials I use to tie them are probably similar. The casting, the mending of the line on the surface to avoid drag, the take and the fight are the same.
It is not about catching more fish or bigger fish--although that comes with learning from mistakes and smarter people. It is about participating in the man-earth drama and letting it refine your character, even as it fills your senses and memories with spots of floral brilliance, deep and seductive greens, rushing water, sunlight over the bluff and trout leaving your hand, jetting out to cover and leaving a cloud of silt that settles on your wading boots.
The goal is not Ludditism, but rather to do the things only humans can do, in a beautiful environment that demands focus, creativity, persistence and effort of us.
Lower Wisconsin Challenges
Technology is of little use for me too on the Lower Wisconsin River. Here, for me, weight of gadgetry and technology is a factor. The sandy shoals mean my Alumacraft 1648 must run shallow, and a 15-horse outboard on a crank-up jackplate gets me where I need to go. With the bottom constantly reconfiguring itself, maps and GPS are of little use--what was navigable or fishy water one day will be an inch of water or dry sand tomorrow. I'd had a trolling motor on the boat, but just holding steady in the current was beyond its capabilities, and failing a more powerful motor and weight of another battery, the juice has just not been worth the squeeze.
Every extra pound makes it that much more difficult when the boat does slide up on a shoal hidden by glare, or when the water drops and the boat, moored to a tree behind the house, is suddenly mostly on dry land.
The Lower Wisconsin is unforgiving--I wrote with Stoic philosopher Kai Whiting on the moral lessons it has provided to me. This river will kill you if you let it--we lose people way too often. One young man disappeared some 20 miles upstream. They found him more than a year later a couple miles downstream from my house.
The 92 miles of river from the last dam at Prairie du Sac is mostly in conservancy, and runs wild with no dredging or other artificial allowances for navigation. You won't see a man made structure or find a cell signal through most of it.
Again, the senses come into play, and I navigate standing up for visibility, using an extension tiller and a holding a grab bar to avoid being thrown from the boat. The river will press past emerging shoals, and the telltale signs like color of light reflecting off the surface and the line of protein bubbles help delineate the seam between deeper and shallower water. The river and its catfish require that we understand the food chain--which means the first step is catching bait. A redhorse or sheepshead or mooneye comes over the gunwale on a nightcrawler, and becomes several pieces of cut bait and fished deep behind a two- or three-ounce slip sinker.
The fish are not as brilliantly colored and delightful to gaze upon as the trout in the streams, but they are larger and thuggish and have broken a couple of my spinning rods where the blank meets the grip. They punish mistakes and inattention, and while purists will turn up their nose at the catfish and sturgeon I catch on the Lower Wisconsin, once I've gotten them hooked up with one their tune changes.
The delicate cast and offering of fly fishing, the heft and brute force of the catfish tackle, they are unified by the naked pitting of man against nature.
Man v Nature = Business v Market
What both of these environments do is put someone on the spot. You either understand the environment well enough to make things happen, or you do not. Gadgets will only help you so much. Your title, your position, your investment portfolio, your status--none of them matter here. And I hate to tell you--AI will not solve problems for you that you cannot first define and build a process around. You are still on the hook for results. You still most understand, visualize a future state and then work to achieve it.
Observation. Problem-solving. And then the focus to do small things well and execute--these should all sound familiar to people who need to bring buyers and sellers together, either in sales, in marketing or as a third-party analyst like myself.
But there is more. Apart from our senses, these disciplines require that we live somewhat in the mental future--envisioning what is unseen by extrapolating from limited information.
Standing in an unnamed trout stream (the streams I fish have names, but just as I respect NDAs, no I am not naming my streams), I may see small trout rising to caddisflies coming off the surface. Maybe I drift an elk hair caddis down to them and catch a few.
Maybe I also think of how vulnerable these small trout are feeding like that, tie on a larger streamer and fish it at the margins of the pod for that larger brown lurking in deeper water, waiting for the ideal moment for some opportunistic cannibalism. We must see what is in front of us, and also see what is hidden.
Similarly, a construction software vendor may be tightly focused on a narrow segment of the market, but the underlying functionality their ideal customer demands is very similar to what companies in an adjacent market also require. Is that a potential new market for the software vendor, and is this software truly appropriate for these new prospective customers?
Observation, analysis make for more realistic decisions than those made unilaterally. Absent deep understanding of the underlying customer need, competitive landscape, risks presented by aging and emerging technology and other factors, an endeavor such as this will probably end poorly.
Technology will only help you so much. You can get lists of the number of prospects in a given sector, lob automated communication at them from the cheap seats, segment them by subindustry, company size, solution interest and job function.
Whether I am sitting at my tying vise cranking off another Pink Squirrel or helping a software vendor connect the dots between their features and customer benefits, or clarifying for software buyers how one product delineates itself from another in terms of function, risk or lifecycle cost, the underlying approach is the same.
Understand. Learn the water, the quarry, the ecosystem, the current, the business use case, the ideal customer profile, the software architecture, the process flow. Then present a vision that unites the party of this drama--this man vs earth drama, this company vs competitor drama--this drama of each of us searching for security, comfort and value in an unforgiving world.
Better Together
Another important similarity between my off-hours art and daytime discipline is that they are made better and more meaningful by the presence of others. On trout streams and the Lower Wisconsin, safety is also a consideration. Some older friends' wives won't let them venture out onto our trout streams alone. A foot down a gopher hole or in a skinny ravine buried in tall grass, a fall down a bank, or even just sinking in the stream bed, into some of that silt that eroded off of our hills centuries ago, mean each solo outing could end in tragedy.
The Lower Wisconsin is also safer with others. But what has become more meaningful to me is the experience of seeing others grow in the art, experience success, and come to master these rugged environments. I am not a guide. Freely I have received, freely I shall give. But to see a 10-year old land his first fish on a fly, or the novice lay out his or her first graceful 30-foot fly cast, or a 7-year-old land her first sturgeon from the Wisconsin--that's the real substance for me these days.
This spirit of giving freely of what we have infilitrates my professional pursuits too. I have to remember to figure out how to get paid, yes, but what motivates me is not the check. My software clients are locked in battle against stout competition in a demanding market--in an environment that is constantly changing in upredictable ways.
Even when I lower myself into a trout stream I know very well and have fished in similar conditions many times, nothing in nature is static. Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, who greatly influenced Stoicism, wrote that we never step in the same river twice. In their book Being Better, Whiting and co-author Leonidas Konstantakos explain this in the following manner:
When you first step into a river, you are confronted with flowing waters. This means that when you stop into the river a second time, the waters you meet are entirely different, and therefore you are not, in fact, stepping into the same river. This is true even if you stand in the same spot.
This is true of any river, but it is even more characteristic of the wild waters I fish. They change from moment to moment, from day to day, from year to year. For us in business, artificial intelligence (AI), proliferation of the internet of things (IoT), reality capture technology, reshuffling demographics, evolving industry standards, volatile market conditions--here too we need to observe, understand and plan accordingly.
This, my friends, is my wheelhouse. I am here to help you.
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