A fine fishing liar is a master in his field and a sage dispenser of a special kind of wisdom well worth hearing and heeding.

Robert Ruark, arguably the finest outdoor writer this country has ever produced and certainly a lifelong favorite of mine, had firm opinions when it came to fishing tales. He reckoned that any man who insisted on being a stickler for accuracy when it came to the size of fish simply couldn’t be trusted under any circumstances, and you certainly didn’t want a miscreant of that stripe handling the church collection plate on Sunday. I don’t know that I would go quite that far, but an angler who won’t stretch things a bit when it comes to the length and weight of a fine catch is poor company, a flat-out bore and unworthy of the attention of any self-respecting sportsman.

Let’s consider some aspects of fishing tales, maybe rooted in truth but with a liberal sprinkling of exaggeration. One of the most common expressions in the vocabulary of fishermen is “I lost a good one.” Similarly, tales of broken lines, a hook pulling out at the last moment and other misfortunes are integral parts of the sport. A fellow who never mentions losing a fish is simply unreliable—he belongs in the same class as turkey hunters who say they never missed a gobbler or deer hunters who never had an adrenaline rush when they spotted a trophy buck.

Yet any fisherman who states he has “lost a good’un” has, in effect, played fast and loose with the truth. As Izaak Walton, the nearest thing we have in angling to a patron saint, wrote long ago in his sixteenth-century book, The Compleat Angler, “A man cannot lose what he never had.” Over the years I’ve used that tidbit of undeniable wisdom to good advantage countless times. I’d ask a group at a seminar I was presenting or fly-fishing class I was teaching how many of them had ever lost a good fish. Invariably almost every hand in the room would shoot up. At that juncture I would share Walton’s words and note that I felt comfortable because I was in good company—a group of practiced and professing fishing liars.

The Master Fishing Liar

The simple truth of the matter is that we all enjoy telling tales of the “one that got away,” never mind that it involves some innocent lying. My Grandpa Joe was a master of the art. He would have been appalled had anyone suggested he was untruthful, and had I dared venture into that forbidden territory, chances are I would have soon found myself dealing with stern admonitions at best or the business end of a keen hickory switch at worst. In fact, I remember all too well my one amateurish attempt at lying to Grandpa.

It didn’t involve fishing directly, although I had been digging fishing worms. Somehow I decided it would be fun to stop digging momentarily and torment two of his roosters a bit. After all, one of them had attempted to flog me just a few days earlier, and I was already in the chicken lot. Boys are just that way, things happen, and all too often, things fell apart. Basically the upshot of all of this was that the roosters raise such a ruckus Grandpa came to check out what was going on and all but caught me in the act. I tried to lie my way out of it. Alas, he readily saw through my all too transparent mendacity and I paid the price.

I stray a bit though. Grandpa Joe loved to tell fish tales, and no matter how many times he related a particular saga, each time was as different and distinctive as it was delightful. He believed in embellishing, did it wonderfully well, readily acknowledged as much and all the while kept his youthful audience of one entranced. Often I heard him say, chuckling and in a quiet voice pitched so low you had to listen intensely to understand him: “It’s a mighty poor piece of cloth that can use no embroidery.”

His favorite “one that got away” story involved a monstrous jackfish, which was the local name for muskies. Over the course of my passage through adolescence that fish grew from four feet or so in length to being as long as Grandpa was tall. Had he lived another decade beyond the four score plus earthly years he enjoyed, I have no doubt whatsoever that the fish would have become the ultimate denizen of freshwater depths.

Fishing and Fiction are Inseparable

Over the years I’ve increasingly come to appreciate the fact that a really good fishing liar, one of Grandpa Joe’s ilk, is a skilled artist. He is a craftsman with words and often with gestures (Grandpa could not talk without gesticulating, using his hands for emphasis and almost as visual punctuation marks). He can work an audience, whether it’s a lone starry-eyed youngster of a room full of adults, like a pulpit-pounding tent-meeting preacher or an old-time purveyor of patent medicines. Somehow he makes his stories seem credible even when, deep down, you know they are ranging widely in the realms of fiction.

In fact, fishing and fiction are inseparable, and an accomplished fishing liar is a fellow to be cultivated, a friend to be appreciated, and a character to be cherished. He lightens your days and brightens your ways. Chances are he’s a salt-of-the-earth sort with whom you could trust all of your worldly goods or to extend a helping hand should you get down on your luck. Conversely, any fisherman who refuses to embellish probably would embezzle funds from a widow’s pension or scoff at the very idea of Santa Claus. Who wants to deal with misguided misanthropes of this sort? Not me. I’ll take someone for whom time adds to the size of a fish or the romance of the setting.

The value of a fine fishing liar needs to be recognized. He is a specialist, a master in his field and a sage dispenser of a special kind of wisdom well worth hearing and heeding. So the next time you hear a whopper, far from challenging it, relish the moment for the treasured occasion it is.

Note: Jim Casada is Editor at Large and longtime book columnist for Sporting Classics. The latest of his numerous books, A Smoky Mountain Boyhood: Memories, Musings, and More, is available through the Sporting Classics Store.