(The Shokuryoshi Experiment)
As the days get warmer and the light starts to fade later and later each day, I look to prepare myself for another season of fishing. I practiced plenty of ideas through 2023, experimenting to find what worked and what didn’t. But what techniques or tactics do we adopt into our practice, and how do we decide? For the purpose of this experiment (placing myself in the shoes of someone who had to catch fish for a living) I decided to set up a spreadsheet to track progress. I went back through journal entries from when I started recording to compile information on previous seasons as a way to set a base to measure progress.
Without knowing that this is where my interest would lead me, I had to find a way to quantify my success on the water. In reading about the shokuryoshi, the common measurement I see mentioned time and again is the weight of fish they bring back to sell. I never thought to bring a way to measure the weight my catches on the stream, to me it’s not something that is or was relative to my practice of recreational fishing. So, without records of the weight of catches over the past couple years, that metric wouldn’t work.
It seems that there were situations where the shokuryoshi would have specific orders to fill, whether it’s species, size, numbers, or any combination of the three. While targeting a specific species could be one way to do it, I wanted to be able to gauge my progression as an angler without having to create specific comparisons for each species I may chase in the year. With that being said, I only included records for trout or char caught in previous years.
Measuring my catches has never been a metric that is terribly important to me. I’m not saying I don’t estimate the size of the fish I bring to the net, but the majority of them I would put between 4 and 8 inches. I don’t chase trophies either. Occasionally I cross paths with a bigger fish, or a new personal best, but that’s not the main drive in my enjoyment of fishing.
So, with all things considered, I decided to make it a numbers game. But there’s a bit more to it than just my total catches for any given outing. I wanted to be able to measure efficiency and time management in some way. Sure I could have just tallied up total fish caught in any given outing, but with so many dynamic conditions faced throughout the years, I didn’t feel total fish caught would necessarily reflect my ability to problem solve while on the water and adjust my tactics to bring more fish to the net.
So, after some thought, this is what I settled on…
The Metrics
I would compile the data for a year at a time. Month by month, from May 1st to November 1st of years that had records (I didn’t record any outings in 2022 due to laziness), I would record the number of sessions, approximate hours fished, and the amount of fish caught during that session.
At the bottom of each column I have the totals for each metric to compare between the years.
I then divided the amount of fish caught in the month by the approximate hours fished in that month to get a number of fish per hour.
Underneath all the rows, at the bottom of the column, I also have an average of fish per hour and fish per outing for the year.
In doing this, I felt I had a base set of metrics to track both my progression as an angler, but also my time management. I could now move through the year and compare how I was doing at the end of each month to the same month in previous years, or even the years themselves.
I have decided to continue this exercise of thought for the year of 2024, and to do a monthly recap including the updated metrics.
With that being said, I do want to stress one point for anyone following along, or doing the same experiment. First and foremost, fishing should be fun. You should enjoy your time on the water. While this adds a little bit of responsibility on my part when it comes to recording the information, I don’t let the numbers ruin my time on the water. I still fish in the spots I want to fish, and still do my best to get out as much as I can. I’m using the numbers to measure progress and, in a way, gauge if the ideas I have really do improve my angling.