Vale Vic Mc Cristal , aged 86 , last week, The older folk on here will know the name , the younger should take the time too.

Less known in the west , he was a champion of the sort of things we rec fishers now take for granted, like the right to have a say in our own future, and the catch and release ethos.

A true man before his time , he spoke up for conservation, anglers rights, and took fishing as a pastime to new levels that we all enjoy now.

This passage a reflection on his thoughts.

"When a man understands the two kinds of hunting, it becomes difficult to maintain enthusiasm for the artificial kind." By 'artificial kind', McCristal means hunting or fishing simply to kill rather than taking a creature's life for food.  The kind of hunting shown in the infamous kangaroo scene of what is perhaps Australia's best film, Wake In Fright.  When people, generally shocked, ask me why I release fish, I tell them it is because I have spent so much time stalking them and observing their behaviour that I appreciate fish too completely as uniquely living beings to regularly kill them.  Fish have a right to live of their own accord, not just as an extension of the human appetite.  Of course I do sometimes take a fish to eat - of late, each time I hook a queenfish I have hoped it was a mackerel, which I very much enjoy eating.  This sentiment is something every keen sport fisherman understands, and we find its philosophy nowhere better espoused than in Vic McCristal's writing.  A hunter or angler should only kill what they intend to eat, and should always bear in mind conservation of the species one chases.  This gestalt switch in ecological attitude which takes place in those initially most committed to hunting and angling stands as a testament to the special orientation towards nature that is native to these activities.  Perhaps we become more fully immersed in the kind of hunting and gathering that the long development of the human body has evolved in relation to.  It is true that, in these activities, the senses intimately absorbed by the natural world, we become gladder, throwing free the stress of the modern and highly unnatural environments of work in which our badgered bodies etch out a living five days a week.