There’s a lot I’d like to tell my younger self!
PHOTOGRAPHY SCOTT LLOYD AND FRIENDS
WELL, IF I COULD TALK TO MYSELF as a young lad, I’d tell him that he has a hell of a lot to learn! You never stop learning, but wow, there’s an awful lot I didn’t know back then compared to what I know now, and that’s what makes this game—if you’d like to call it that. If it was easy, would it be as enjoyable and exciting? Maybe not. For me, it’s all about feeding that addictive personality. If it was given to us on a plate, we wouldn’t appreciate it as much, and that’s a guarantee. It keeps you thrilled. It’s the elements of challenge, and the chase, and learning from your wrongs in the past and trying to address these for the future. It’s the failures: when it should’ve happened but it didn’t… the frustrations of what, where and how… the list really is endless! If you’re an angler with that addictive personality, it’s exactly the same as how some might treat a potential relationship. If you give up easily after very little effort, it might not be as entertaining as chasing a person who’s playing hard to get and therefore keeping you on your toes! putting a single hookbait out and baiting around it. I always thought, Why try to put bait around a rig, when I can combine them both in a method like a bag? That was my motto for fishing, you might say. Still to this day, it makes total sense with the tactic. I’m not sitting here thinking that I had it totally wrong, but what I didn’t know was that sometimes those fish wouldn’t want to just go in and eat these small little parcels of bait, especially if they’d been caught like that before. During that era, though, and around the time I was using it, everyone else had also used it and had hammered fish on them.