A Long November

Slumps happen. 

I’d like to think that once you reach a certain level of success in any sport/hobby/lifestyle that periods of low success stop happening. But you only need to look as far as Manchester City’s recent flatlining to see that even a nation state funding a sporting club with the best coaches, talent and cheating executives isn’t enough to protect people at the highest levels from slumping, badly. 

I recently went through a slump that hit me harder than I was expecting. Fly fishing for carp isn’t just my hobby, but for some reason I have made it my job, in taking people out to catch them in my guiding, designing flies and writing about these mysterious golden ghosts. So when I slammed face first into the first cold front of the fall, I not only couldn’t catch them, but I’d completely lost them. And when I lost the fish, I started to lose myself. 

From November 5th to November 17th, I did not see a single carp. I went out to my fishery day after day, expecting the fish to do what I expected them to do, to switch from the flats to eating midges and spiders in the surface film. But the overnight change from 85-95 degree weather to a high of 60s’ during the day and below freezing night time temperatures, seemed to have a bigger impact on the fish than anticipated. 

It’s funny how this can affect your mind, taking you from a hero to a zero real fast. Last few seasons it was a gradual change from the flats to the dry flies, this season was a hard drop off from a very productive October into a sobering November. Confidence is key in fishing, and even more so in guiding, and I had reached a new low. 

The reason I love carp is because they challenge me, they push you to your limits, they surprise you, they break you and then they throw you a bone, sometimes. So you can’t hate them when they make things tough on you, so what is left to do but take it out on yourself? I found myself waking up early and coming home late, slumping down onto the sofa to try to figure out what was wrong. I consulted some ancient psychics, and meditated deep into the carp mindset to try and figure out what they were doing.

Most people might just have gone to another fishery while riding out the storm, but I felt compelled to figure this out. If insanity is the act of doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, I did different things over and over again in the same place expecting different results. I can’t even make a good analogy anymore due to the events that transpired. 

So how does one get over a slump such as this? In my case I just keep slamming my head against the wall until either one gives. Some people call this a “grind”, a very popular social media term that I think gets overused on slightly windy and cold days, a way of making tough conditions sound “hardcore”. I don’t think there’s anything romantic or hardcore about days when you can’t find the carp, since unlike most fishing when you can blind cast for a fish you’re actually doing something. When you can’t find the carp you’re just hiking with a rod, driving around with binoculars, or cruising on the boat. You got nowhere to hide from the lack of fish, just deeper to go into your mind… 

Days turned into weeks, and sleep stopped being sleep but dreams of what I was doing wrong, where I should be going, what I should be doing. I kept seeing carp laughing at me in my nightmares, the slow, distorted laugh of a puppet master laughing at his puppets, pulling the strings, breaking the spirit, and there I was, losing my mind. The days blended together, my theories proven wrong again and again. 

And then one day I stopped the car along a high bank overlooking a part of the lake, which was calm as glass. I went to the edge to pee, a bathroom with a view is always the best. And there was a group of carp, feeding on midges in the surface film, just like they were supposed to be doing! I don’t know if I’ve felt relief like this before, maybe when I dropped out of college, but also, that didn’t feel this good. I immediately snapped a picture of them to send to my girlfriend, who may have been even more relieved than me, since she’d had to hear my depressing moaning of “where are the damn carp???” and the increasingly steep downwards spiral of my mental state through the month. It’s amazing what carp can do. 

Since then, the fishing has been excellent, technical, tough, and brutal in its own way, but just what the doctor ordered, and I’m seeing a lot of fish. Tough fishing is what I love, but you need to see the carp, or at least see signs of them, to have success with them on the fly. 

The strange part of all of this is that what transpired isn’t that unusual, early to mid-November is usually pretty tough for carp in the lakes as it’s a transition month. In years past I’ve just focused on chasing them in the creeks, or gone to the beaches for surf perch or focused on bass. This year I was overly convinced I could make the carp do what I wanted them to do, that somehow I’d just find them feeding in the surface film a few weeks earlier than I usually do. And calendar wise, when I did find that group of surface feeding carp when I was peeing, it was almost exactly at the same time a year ago that I found the first groups feeding up top then. 

So what is to be learned from this exactly? Most slumps aren’t due to the conditions, the economy, the burritos or even the fish themselves. A slump is in the mind, and sometimes the same qualities that make you successful at something, the obsessiveness, the perfectionism, the drive and the thinking that you can solve almost any problem you face in your field, are the same qualities that get in your own way. 

I got struck with this notion as I watched a press conference with Pep Guardiola, the manager of Manchester City, one of the most successful coaches in the modern football (soccer) era, after a six game losing streak. The man looked lost, having scratched his face during the game from the top of his shiny bald head and over his nose. The confidence and witty comments are gone, replaced by a seemingly average man in denial, struggling to find his footing on a downwards slide.

While I admit I’m not close to that level of success, we’re all just humans, and on some level it is comforting to know that the slump is something that finds us all.