Dear Matt,
A couple of weeks ago, I was fishing with friends in the Bahamas. Our guide mentioned that a guy recently came down with a drone and sent it across the flats to scout for fish before venturing out of the boat to wade. What are your feelings about this next phase of fishing?
Sincerely,
C.R.
Houston, TX
I won’t go so far as to say drones should be completely outlawed. But I am a situational libertarian: I’m against the government ever encroaching on my freedoms, but if they restrict yours in the interest of enhancing mine, we can work with that. So I will go so far as to say that drones should be completely outlawed from operating anywhere near me. Especially while I’m fishing.
It’s not that drones have no utility. I can see how they might come in handy when spying on your comely neighbor taking a bath. (Privacy, being such an outmoded 20th-century conceit.) Or for killing terrorists, or at least nearby neighbors who live in the terrorist’s subdivision (close enough). Or for putting delivery-persons out of business, if you’re the kind of corporatist who worries that America hasn’t already killed enough decent-paying working-class jobs. Allow a truck driver to raise a family while earning high-five figures, and he might get all uppity, trying to jump the line to apply for a job in an Amazon fulfillment center after all work—aside from Internet retail—ceases to exist.
But it does seem like using spy cams to catch fish is sort of like congratulating yourself for having congress with a sexbot. You might achieve climax. But you’ll smell of thermoplastic elastomer, sani-wipes, and shame. Romance should be both more unpredictable, and require more effort of the romancer, than merely popping fresh Duracells into the object of your manufactured affection.
Similarly, fishing drones are just another way to allow tech-world to do what tech-world does best—to destroy everything, to profane the sacred—fishing, being about as sacred as it gets. If being a cold, fish-catching efficiency machine was all I was after when stalking God’s most perfect creatures (next to dogs), I’d trade in my fly rod for a chum bag and a throw net. But that’s no way to respect your dance partner, even if you’re (admittedly) trying to deceive your dance partner into mistaking sharp steel for fish food.
Periodically, friends in my fishing circle will send around Internet videos of drone-assisted fishing. You can see the ethical slippery slope at work. There’s these guys, from Sea Ulcer Aerial Media (a sea ulcer, being a good description of what I get when I see people catching longtail tuna with drones). Though at least they seem just to be dropping lines/bait hundreds of yards offshore to get fish that otherwise would be out of casting reach. But then there’s this joker, who is actually pulling bluegill off their spawning beds by jigging with a drone. Assuming the fish survives its aerial flight for the protracted period it’s out of water, what is Beardo the Bluegill Molester proving exactly? This isn’t fishing, so much as turning a fishery into the equivalent of the pick-a-plushie-toy claw crane arcade machine you see at Chuck E. Cheese. It disgusts me in every way imaginable, and in several ways I’ve yet to imagine.
Though at least Beardo jigs for the fish (almost) fairly and squarely. Better than this guy, who actually trolls a jitterbug from a drone in order to catch a smallmouth, which the drone then “plays” by dragging the bronzeback a couple hundred yards back to its nerd operator, who is exclaiming “holy crabapples!” I love smallies. I catch them all the time. But what kind of self-respecting fisherman would want to catch one in this way? It feels too much like sucker-punching a puppy in the mouth. I’m sure somebody is already deliberately snagging fish with drones, which isn’t sport so much as cold-blooded piscicide, but I haven’t the heart to look.
Like most tech-world “advances,” this new means of fishing cuts things down to size, including the fisherpersons who practice it. But what if we’re better off leaving some things large and less manageable? What if fishing’s natural inefficiency isn’t something that should be eliminated, but jealously guarded at all costs? As Tom McGuane wrote in The Longest Silence: “Angling is extremely time consuming. That’s sort of the whole point. That is why in our high-speed world anglers, as a kind of preemptive strike, call themselves bums, addicts, and maniacs. We’re actually rather quiet people for the most part but our attitude toward time sets us at odds with our own society.”
The beauty of fishing is so often its uncertainty: trying to know what can’t be definitively known since its secrets exist in a dimension that we’re unable to inhabit. Every time I go fishing, I am probing this liquid mystery with a graphite stick. And I like that the mystery never becomes wholly unmysterious, no matter how much mastery I appear to have of it on a given day.
Some days, after checking my tide tables and solunar charts, I walk out on a long rock jetty in the Chesapeake Bay, and catch 30 stripers without moving a step or even particularly trying. It feels kind of like the universe has set me loose with a gift card, telling me to buy whatever I want. And even during the gluttonous bounty, I feel gratitude for each fish that comes to hand, and which, once unhooked, swims away clean to tend to its fish business or to tell tales of near misses to fish kin. Other days, I do everything right (or what I guess might be right), and get mercilessly skunked as I curse the fates and fish gods. But the successes mean more precisely because the possibility of failure is always there. And those successes are my own, working in tandem with nature’s whims—not those of a machine whirring overhead to demystify the mystery, taking my potentially misguided guesswork out of it.
Part of the appeal of fishing is knowing that the fish are there to be caught. But part of the charm of it is also what John Buchan described as being “elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.” Believing that the fish are there often beats knowing that they’re not.
Aside from making an unpleasant racket and spooking fish (who are probably likely to mistake a hovering drone for an angry osprey), fishing drones, it seems, are yet one more tech-world incursion into leaching the magic and mystery out of humanity’s tragi-dramedy. Two years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report on the commercial applications of drone technology, ominously titled “Clarity From Above.” In it, they stipulated that drones could supplant $127 billion worth of human labor, in every field from transport to telecommunications.
The problem with the march of “progress” oftentimes is that it keeps ruthlessly marching on, even when it comes to more closely resemble regress. (With massive technologically-induced unemployment, we may be headed for the Great Leap Backward.) Some “innovations” can’t be avoided. Yet some can. So why apologize for keeping on avoiding them as long as humanly possible? Why invite the temple to be defiled, when the temple vandals are only faintly knocking, not breaking down the door?
There was a telling moment in the PricewaterhouseCoopers report. The kind of telling where the teller didn’t even know they were telling it. The moment came from Michael Mazur, a partner in the company Drone Powered Solutions, which is described as “a dedicated team of PwC Poland supporting its clients from various industries in terms of maximizing the potential offered by drone technologies.”
In the report’s abstract, Mazur opined, in his best impression of a Philip K. Dick heavy, “Clarity from above seeks to quantify the impact of drones on business by examining commercial applications of drone technology across industry sectors. As this is not only about machines (drones) but their broader applications, we have decided to use the term drone powered solutions.”
By now, most of us might be inured to such unattractive, jargon-heavy technobabble. And yet, there you have it, in one paragraph: the best case that could possibly be made for the need for escape from what passes as progress with silent, restorative, drone-less fishing.
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