Lies--Damn Lies--and The Logic of Catching Fish

Mark Twain once said, “There are three kinds of lies:”

• Lies
• Damn Lies
• and Statistics

Anglers as a group are almost expected to share a few lies. No mathematical equation could even begin to calculate how many 9 pound fish grew to exceed the 10 pound mark upon retelling of the tale…When regaling the gang at the local watering hole, virtually every 3 minute fight to the net stretches into stories about “15 minutes of arm-wrenching, sweaty embattlement”. And what self-respecting fish junky wouldn’t report that 6 fish day as “about a dozen” when pressed for specifics.

Due to the cultural expectation for exaggeration, we anglers tend to take it a step further…We even lie to ourselves! I’ll prove it to you, but first a bit of background.  You see, I had the misfortune of studying logic in college. And not just a class or two, but 9 years of it! Logic, Debate, Argumentation, Statistical Analysis, Persuasion…if Roget’s Thesaurus lists it as somehow related to “Logic” I’ve probably studied it. It went so far as to get me hired as the Director of Intercollegiate Debate at Oregon State University for a few years before falling from the ivory tower into a multi-species fishing boat.

So what in heaven’s name does my old college syllabus have to do with fishing? More than you might think. Fishing is an inexact science…we can’t control all the variables like the weather or the attitudes of fish, or the water conditions. We have to play the odds and work from inference.  But even this leads us into deceiving ourselves.

Holter Happenings--Blazing Mid-day Sun, Dead Calm, Absolutely Some of the Best Spring Walleye Fishing Conditions--Ignore the Myths

 I’ll start with an easy “trap” that we all fall into—misreading what actually happened on the water. My favorite example is this…we spend the day out in the boat trolling Rapalas. At the end of the day and with 8 fish in the livewell we high-five each other and head to the marina. The story we tell our buddies is simple, “Man, those Rapalas work great. We’ve got ‘em dialed in.”

But wait! If all we used in the boat that day were Rapalas…guess what? We skewed the statistics so that Rapalas would produce 100% of our fish. The odds weren’t odds at all, but rather a guarantee that Rapalas would be the productive lures. What about other brands of lures or approaches other than trolling? Truth is, we have no idea how other approaches and other baits would have worked that day. We didn’t try any of them! In my real world with a fishing boat that smells like a cannery, there’s no time to test all possible options. And if we try too much testing we never get around to actually working the fish. There will always be more things to test than there is time to test them.

My point here is that no matter how experimental any of us is, we can only actually experiment with a tiny fraction of the possible options. And when it comes down to telling the story to our liar friends, we tell ‘em we outfished every boat on the water. That guide we all hate? Crushed his catch rate…Didn’t see another boat catch jack diddly while we lit ‘em up. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a fishing boat without the crew convincing anyone who would listen how much better our catch was vs everyone else.

But let’s run the stats…2 guys in the boat fishing with two rods each for 8 hours catching a total of 8 fish…that’s a very low catch rate…four hours of rod time per fish. Actually, kind of pitiful no matter how much we pat each other on the back and puff up about our prowess. Bet lots of other boats produced statistically better fishing that day on that lake! And do we prioritize numbers of fish or size? I personally almost always emphasize and prioritize size. So my stats as a trophy seeker won’t reflect the same truths as the stats of the people looking to eat fresh fillets tonight.

And while I’m on the topic of stats…I almost always fish alone so I’m hyper aware that the catch in my boat is almost guaranteed to be lower than other boats around me. Kills me when that boatload of buddies comes in with 8 fish and I only caught 5…let the razzing begin. But in this instance, when one angler catches 5 fish, the other boat with 4 guys onboard has to catch 5 PER ANGLER to match me…they need 20 in their boat just to equal my 5 fish!

This stat gets boasted in the opposite direction too. Whenever I’m alone and catch 5 fish, it’s pretty easy to pull my shoulders back, flex my lats a bit like a walleye flexing it’s spiny dorsal fin, and tell anyone who will listen, “Yeah, if I’d had 3 anglers in the boat with me that would have been 20 fish. Helluva day!” See how easy that is…my story goes from 5 fish to 20 without even exaggerating. Just bring in the “what if” statistics for extra rods in the boat and my numbers multiply.

One of my favorite angler self-deceptions is less of a statistic and more of a perspective. My logic texts call it the Post Hoc Fallacy. In essence, the Post Hoc Fallacy means we presume that after we do something different and catch fish we must have caught those fish because of that change. Very commonly when we anglers change the color of our lure or plastics, we naturally presume subsequent catches came because of the change. “After this, therefore because of this,” is the logician’s description…But wait! Did you also change location or depth? Even slightly? Did you fish the different color at a different time of day? Could the bulk of the fish have switched onto a good bite after sitting idle and teasing us for the past couple hours? Maybe lengthening shoreline shadows just brought cover to the predators so they are now gobbling whatever you might have thrown?

Human psychology makes it clear that when we choose to strategically change something about our presentation and then catch fish we are programmed to take full credit. “Damn fine decision I made there” is how we justify it to ourselves. Sometimes it might be a great decision, but often the change is of far less importance than we think. It’s the post hoc fallacy, After-This-Therefore-Because-of-This—can you be sure?

12+ Pounder on Tiber Reservoir--Hot Mid-day Sun--Calm--Possibly The Best Post-Spawn Conditions!

After 9 years of college logic classes I can assure you that this discussion barely scratches the surface as to how we lie to ourselves regarding our catch. Did we actually outfish all the other boats on the lake? Maybe…Was our presentation the best possible—it did catch fish for us…Again, maybe…Did our change of baits or colors cause a better catch rate or did the catch rate simply go up and we gave the credit to our change of tactics?

Mark Twain may be best known for his stories about characters we all wanted to be as kids—Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Becky Thatcher or even the town drunk. But one of Mark Twain’s most important roles was to poke fun at society’s foibles…like the overemphasis of statistics which, in the end, are often manipulated to create outright lies. So the next time you want to compare our catch stats, come on over to my place and we can paint the fence together. You bring the beverages!