I read somewhere that kids these days are the most stressed in history. It’s easy for me to understand, it’s because of social media. Being a teenager is hard enough, but add in social media and it’s so much worse. Why? Their social media feeds are filled with a constant barrage of images of other people’s “perfect” lives. Carefully selected pics of happy moments, amazing trips or experiences, modeling pics, winning races, etc, etc. You get the picture. Anyone’s real life can’t possibly compare.
The same is true in fishing. Look at instagram feeds. It’s full of record size trout, monster redfish, doormat flounder, tarpon on fly, etc etc. If you have a trip and don’t catch anything but small fish, or worse yet, get skunked, you must be a loser, awful fisherman, etc.
It’s all BS. Many TV shows take more than one attempt to get a few catch pics. Some even hook a fish, set it back out, and film it being “caught”. There are all kinds of games going on that aren’t apparent to the eye.
Let’s keep it real. Don’t compare yourself to what you see on social media. Be thankful for time on the water, time with family or friends, any fish that you catch – large or small. That’s where happiness comes from. Each of us have different definitions of a good day on the water. That might be catching one fish, catching many, catching a new species, or a personal best. Who cares what other people think!
I try to keep it real on our social media, by sharing as many of our customer’s pics as possible. My favorite are the kids pics. I will say that every pic that we post is caught on our products. We do not stick our jigs in a fish mouth when it was caught in some other way.
On this subject, there have been a number of recent reports in Charleston about how great the catching has been recently. Not for us! Not on artificials anyway. The last couple weeks have been extremely difficult fishing for us. We have struggled to find fish in usual good spots, often passing through very thoroughly without a bite. There may be a number of reasons for this, and it probably has to do with bait just starting to move in thick, so hopefully the bite will improve a lot soon.
I had the privilege of taking a youth member of Summerville Saltwater Anglers fishing this weekend in our member tournament. He had a good day, catching his first trout on top, and a few really nice redfish. You can’t beat that smile! Grant will be a force to be reckoned with in the future. Very skilled young man.
Weedless Jigs – You asked, we listened. We will be announcing our new weedless jig line very soon. We have designed the head to shed grass, and added a wire weedguard. The hook is a 3/0 Mustad Ultrapoint. They work great dragging oysters, sliding through spartina or seagrass, or pulling through brush and branches. Most importantly, don’t lose as many fish as many weedless jigs do. Lots of hard work has gone into them and they have been called “The Ultimate Redfish Jig” by one of our collaborators. Stay tuned for more info.