A few years ago I wrote a story that began by stating that to capture the fish was not all of the fishing. It was a quote from Zane Grey, who knew a thing or two about fishing, but was quite clearly deluded.

To capture the fish is actually not much of the fishing at all, if old Zane were being completely candid.

Robert Hughes, who also knows a thing or two about fishing, was closer to the mark in his most recent book, A Jerk on One End.

"Fishing largely consists of not catching fish. Failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are to football," Hughes wrote.

He detailed how, when he took into account the cost of his boat, pen fees, maintenance and wear and tear, each pound of North American bluefish (tailor to us Australians) was ending up costing him about $US55, when he could get it at a fish market for about $3.50

And had he made the calculations after his recent travails in Western Australia, the ratio would have been much worse.

Few fishermen, no matter how poorly equipped, ill-prepared or careless, can lay claim to their fishing trip ending in a near fatal car crash, charges of dangerous driving, a long and tortuous court case and impending defamation action, as happened to the eloquent New York based art critic last year in Broome.

It’s a rather extreme example, but we can all relate to such meaningless rationalisations. Just take an annual trip to the north west, as I do with photographers Ron D’Raine, John Mokrzycki, Ian Ferguson and Guy Magowan every year.

Even before a wheel is turned north, each of us spends say, a full two days in preparation — there’s 48 hours. At the other end of the trip, another say 12 hours cleaning up. Add that to the eight days actually away, that’s a total of 264 hours. We’re not talking money here, just time.

Now, on an average trip, I defy any of my companions to prove that each of us spends any more than a couple of hours — and that’s generous — in the actual act of hooking, playing and landing a fish. Two hours, in two hundred and sixty eight. Indeed, on our most recent voyage, I suspect that one of our number did not in fact manage to land a single beast.

There are of course, those among us who put in a huge effort to turn the figures the other way. At Steep Point recently we came across a campsite where two large chest freezers stood neatly together in the sand, fed electricity by a clattering generator. Curiosity got the better of us, and there being nobody around, we lifted the lids. They were as full as a doctor’s wallet, bursting with fillets, whole mackerel and crayfish. Even today, there are those among us who pursue their fishing by the same creed that says your bank account cannot have too much money in it, nor your bathroom too much toilet paper.

But such cases are thankfully becoming more scarce, and the 268 to 2 ratio applies more often than not. With miserable statistics such as these, it is a wonder that the derision of wives and girlfriends does not play on our minds more heavily.

But I like to view the entire process as a swimmer views his or her ascent to Olympic gold, a process that begins at a young age. For ten years or more, the pending champion endures 5am training sessions, barking coaches, endless competitions and repeated failure, injury or sickness, all for the chance at that one shining millisecond of triumph.

It is a comforting thought indeed for any angler who feels the need to justify the ratio of hours spent at the bar to the hours spent being a jerk on one end waiting for a jerk on the other.

So on behalf of all who seek further justification for their idle hours, I went searching for pearls of wisdom and found them in a delightful little booklet called "Fishing, An Angler’s Miscellany."

Here, you will find the likes of Sir Henry Wotton, who concluded, in a masterful piece of rationalisation, that fishing was "an employment for my idle time, which is then not idly spent."

The Babylonians were a sensible lot, too. They declared that ‘the Gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent in fishing.’

Women, of course, have a far more pragmatic approach to almost anything than do men, and will admit to things (like being lost, for example) that men would never dare. "The curious thing about fishing," writes one Gladys Taber, "is you never want to go home. If you catch something, you can’t stop. If you don’t catch anything, you hate to leave in case something might bite."

And another member of her sex actually admits her use of fishing as something that has little to do with catching fish.

"I really fished mainly because I wanted to be alone in the middle of the lake…sometimes a fish jumped nearby, as though it knew it was safe," wrote Susan Allen Toth.

They are so much more down to earth than men, who write of fishing as though it is some sort of cathartic, almost mystical experience, when we know it to be nothing more than Secret Men’s Business. Herbert Hoover, the late US President, must have been suffering from an uncomfortably positioned carrot when he wrote "Fishing is much more than fish…it is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers."

But my favourite quote comes from Norman Maclean.

"Something odd, detached, and even slightly humorous happens to a big-fish fisherman a moment after a big fish strikes.

"In the arm, shoulder or brain of a fish-fish fisherman is a scale, and the moment the big fish goes in the air the big-fish fisherman, no matter what his blood pressure is, places the scale under the fish and coolly weighs him."

Amen.