Christoph Schwennicke, editor-in-chief of the political magazine Cicero, is a passionate casual fisherman. In an interview with FOCUS Online, he explains why this activity triggers feelings of happiness and leads to conflicts with his wife on vacation.
FOCUS Online: Do you advise revealing to a woman that you are an angler on your first date?
Christoph Schwennicke: Under no circumstance! Fishing is not sexy per se. Most women have a problem with someone pulling a rope worm onto a hook with their bare hands and wanting to touch it with the same hands afterwards, regardless of whether they are washed or not.
But?
Schwennicke: Anglers should better understand that hands that can tie a 16 tick to a 0.10 cord offer fine motor skills that can also be beneficial on other occasions.
Nevertheless, the angler remains the man for a second look …
Schwennicke: Yes, unfortunately. I think what women dislike about fishing is, in addition to one or the other unsavory side effect, uncertainty. You like to have it plannable. But fishing cannot be planned, it is an activity involving a thousand unknowns. It starts with shopping. Should you get something for dinner, or can you expect fish to be available after the fishing trip?
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It gets even more complicated on vacation …
Schwennicke: You could say so. In principle, it's only about three hours net on the water, which we stipulate. But these three hours determine the course of the whole day. Now there is too much wind, afterwards there is low tide, and when the tide and calm meet, my wife would like to go for a stroll through town with me. There are fundamental differences in perception.
“The whole vacation is all about your stupid fishing,” she says. "Now I am in this wonderful fishing country and I never get to fish," I think more than I dare to say out loud. The bad thing is: we're both right.
Do fishermen need to be more considerate of their fellow men?
Schwennicke: Probably already. In a community, for example, there are different ideas about what the biofresh zone of a refrigerator is good for. I think this subject only really comes into its own when it comes to meat maggots. These maggots, which hatch from eggs and lay flies in carrion, are unbeatable bait for white fish, and these in turn are needed by predatory fish anglers if they want to catch pike, perch or pikeperch. In the past, in front of the Biofresh compartment, it only took a few days for the maggots to pupate in their sawdust in the plastic bowl and no longer be suitable as bait. My wife basically shares my enthusiasm for the Biofresh compartment, but not as a fresh food store for meat maggots.
Have there been any incidents?
Schwennicke: One or the other incident has hardened the fronts a bit. The plastic bowls in which the maggots are sold aren't exactly made to last. When my wife first discovered the maggots on the move in the Biofresh compartment, their clay cooled to approximately the temperature of that compartment.
What other misunderstandings do anglers have to contend with?
Schwennicke: Oh, they are much more fundamental in nature. People think we fish to catch fish. You don't understand us.
What do you not understand?
Schwennicke: Anyway, I don't want to catch any fish. You don't stand by a river for hours, you don't spend the night by a lake for days, you don't fight nausea for an endless day at sea to catch fish. You do this to avoid catching fish most of the time.
That is the whole point of the matter. Therein lies the attraction, the highest luck, which is only surpassed by luck, to catch a fish every now and then. Anyone who wants to carry fish home goes to the North Sea. We fishermen mostly fail and we like to fail. Failure finds its ultimate expression in fishing. Because only if we have failed nine times can we be an overjoyed person.
Ui, now it's getting philosophical …
Schwennicke: I just want to explain why millions of people, mostly men, stand by a lake or a river and stare holes into the surface of the water. For hours, for days. And why the other millions don't understand. We have to make it clear to them: We may be a little crazy, but basically quite nice.
How does the delivery of this good news fail?
Schwennicke: The problem starts with the appearance. We sometimes stand in clothes by the water that others would hesitate to throw in a used clothes container because people who depend on these donations also have a right to a remnant of human dignity. So we stand there, dressed like a scarecrow and about as alive, our heads sunk low between our shoulders, the hood of an old army parka pulled over our heads, our eyes fixed on the water.
And then this question comes from onlookers, almost off-screen: "Well, what bites?"
Schwennicke: … which is usually meant nicely and signals real curiosity, but only if it is addressed to a normal social worker, not to an average fisherman. He turns around, looks sullen and, at best, emits a monosyllabic collection of consonants that resembles the growling of a Rottweiler. We are bad ambassadors for our cause. Why don't we give the little boy our rod? Why don't we speak fluently and in sentences from subject-predicate-object about what is in the lake?
What could be done about this intercultural gap?
Schwennicke: We anglers need to communicate better. So that normal people better understand why we leave a party at twelve just because the weather change promises good prospects of a fish for the next morning at 4:30. You have to understand why it is an existential experience to witness the bite of a tench in clear water, which circles around our bait in nerve-wracking laps, swims away again and again, twice, comes back and then finally soaks up the cocktail of corn and dustworm, completely slowly. She is the greatest diva among fish.
But patience seems to be a virtue that is no longer very fashionable in our hectic world …
Schwennicke: The feeling of happiness, the kick, only arises when you have put the long wait and hunger behind you. One cannot be had without the other. There is no other way. That's the kick, that's the sex of it.
Speaking of which: In a British study anglers were asked whether they would rather have a large salmon on the hook or a supermodel in bed. Two thirds opted for the salmon. What do you vote for?
Schwennicke: A salmon like that is basically much more erotic than a flawless supermodel. It actually doesn't feel like eating anything when it pulls up the rivers to spawn. He must therefore be seduced by every trick in the book. But once he took a bite, then it goes completely off. Afterwards you are completely exhausted, but infinitely happy and satisfied.
They once divided anglers into types: occasional anglers, competitive fishermen, big game hunters, industrial freezer anglers, aesthetes with a fly rod. Which archetype would you assign yourself to?
Schwennicke: If I had more time, I would probably switch from the occasional angler to the aesthetes. I would never pay 500 euros or more for the day ticket at a stream where I am not even allowed to use barbs on my flies. But learning the throwing technique while fly fishing properly – that would be something.
The esthete puts beauty above success, and that's why he usually doesn't have one. In his thriller “A Brief History of Fly Fishing”, the writer Paulus Hochgatterer gets to the heart of the matter when he writes that it is about “… throwing a fly that is guaranteed not to be bitten by a fish in a place where it will no fish is guaranteed. "
Pure art, completely detached from any purpose – that's it. The art of life is to collect as many valuable, beautiful moments as possible. This is exactly what you do with fishing. You can also say that failure finds its highest expression in fishing.