Why is fishing so Expensive these days?

[MuskieBait]

Gear doesn't make the angler. There are a lot of anglers with all the bling gear (ahem...float guys and fly guys especially) who don't know how to fish.

After all these years, I'm going back to the K.I.S.S principle...and sold off a lot of my lures and other gears not used...because I simply fish for fun...not trophies, not numbers...etc. I'm still crazy about fishing for species...but simple presentations is actually the best way to catch a large number of species. You can catch almost anything on a piece of worm on a split shot and float rig. You can catch countless saltwater fish with just a dropper loop rig with a piece of shrimp or squid.

Get a number of hooks, different size sinkers and you're good to go after spending $5 on bait.

Fishing isn't much more complicated than the past...we're just making it complicated ourselves.

This weekend, I went back to the K.I.S.S principle and had a blast and a tasty lake trout meal. And we spent $8 on bait for 8 guys, I used 2 hooks and one sinker all day. All my pretty shiny lures worth over $300 in total caught nothing all day.

On the other hand, if you are branching out into various methods of fishing, it can get expensive simple because each method may require its own gear. Like you, I've gear for a lot of methods and as budget allows and experience warrants, I've been getter higher and higher quality gear.

To be honest, a lot of my gear is very low end...my 5wt and 8wt fly rods are TFO Professional and the fly reels are Sage 1600 series. It is not even medium level gear but it does the job so that's all I need. My float rod is a 12'6" Shimano Convergence that has done the job for me for the past many years. I'm not looking to upgrade that anytime. My nicest reel are actually two reels that I've yet to receive...an Avet JX that will be arriving...and a Penn International 50SW-2 that a friend is holding for me. Both of these are used gear and I got them on pretty good discount.

Fishing does start to add up, but again, it depends on what you are accumulating. I'm more strategic with purchases now and make sure each piece of gear can be used for multiple potential situations instead of specializing each piece of gear for a very specific technique.