So I get this question a lot, "Sean, why don't you have a YouTube channel?" It is a fair question, one I've thought about many times myself, but never really given it a lot of thought. Since 2011 I have been writing blogs, posting on forums, sharing pictures and stories on social media, so forth and so on. So its safe to assume that a youtube channel would be a reasonable outlet for me to share information. To be honest I have shopped for action cameras such as the go pro, and really I think I would enjoy watching my season highlights over and over. However, I realize the amount of work it would take in editing such videos to share, the attention it would bring to certain waters I fish, the nagging and annoying comments videos tend to attract, etc. Very rarely do you see trolls out there commenting on well written articles, but spend some time on YouTube and you'll find no shortage of these comments. Maybe reading is above these gentleman's IQ level, I'm joking.....sort of. My decision to write and shy away from shooting videos goes a little deeper than that though. First and foremost, writing allows me to reflect and ask myself questions that I would otherwise ignore. (Such as this post.) Furthermore, I feel that a reader and the author of a written text share an equal part of a story. I can sit at a desk and write the most detailed description of an event that I could possibly imagine and the reader would still find a way to make it relatable to him or her in a way that no one else could. For example I wrote the following on Facebook a while ago regarding a recent musky trip:
"About two hours into the trip, while standing in my kayak, I made a long cast over a fallen tree. As my bait bounced off of the topmost limb and began swimming (upright) again I saw a torpedo launch itself from the depths. It was a musky, and a good one at that. By the time the musky had gotten within striking distance it was almost under my kayak....I immediately took the fish into the first turn of the figure 8...The fish stayed within inches of the bait across the nose of the kayak and had made the first turn down the side of the boat. As I began sweeping my bait away from the stern of the kayak, the rod loaded up and the water exploded. The fish was hooked."
Not publishable quality, but a story none the less. So what did you picture? Was it couldy, raining, or sunny? Was I on a large lake, a wide low gradient shallow river, or maybe below a dam fishing trapped pre spawn fish? Was I casting a topwater, a bladed bucktail, a large swimbait? This is the beauty of writing. If I asked a dozen people each would have their own set of details, probably formed from some memory of their own. It could have been a stream they had seen a musky on in the past, a lake where the guys from In-Fisherman targeted musky on, etc. The written article is far from dead, it may not be the most popular outlet to share information but its here to stay.
