Outside Interests Lure Bashline : Outdoorsman: Hunting, fishing and camping guru will share some of his experiences at a meeting this week of a Van Nuys-based fly-fishing club.
The biggest problem, it would seem, for a guy who makes a living from hunting, fishing and camping, might be just what the heck does he do during his vacation? Hustle a few life insurance policies, perhaps? Join the fire department for a few weeks?
Not Jim Bashline. He goes hunting. Or fishing. Or camping.
Bashline, a former managing editor of Field and Stream magazine, simply cannot get enough of outside activities. On Thursday, Bashline, an outdoors columnist and author of several fishing books, will bring a lifetime of fishing and hunting tales and tips to a meeting of the Van Nuys-based Sierra Pacific Flyfishers at The Odyssey restaurant in Granada Hills.
Bashline has fished or hunted in 49 of the 50 states and 32 other countries, weaving tales of ones that did not--and quite a few that did--get away for countless magazines and newspapers. After serving in the Korean War, he became employed as a surveyor. After a few years, he realized that being outdoors all the time and not being able to carry a fly rod or a shotgun was rather silly.
So he packed away the surveying gear and found a way to make a very nice living doing what he loved to do most.
He said that anyone who knew him as a young man should have seen this coming.
“I grew up hunting and fishing with my father,” Bashline said from his home in Spruce Creek, Pa. “And, Sylvia, the girl I married, was also an ardent angler. Her father was a very fine trout fisherman, and, to be honest, that’s one of the reasons I went out with her. I guess I used her to get to her father.”
Their first dates consisted not of movies, Bashline said, but of forays into the woods in search of, among other things, trout.
“Some people thought it was a bit strange,” he said, “but if you think about it, being in the middle of the woods with a pretty young girl isn’t all bad.”
His wife was not just a passive participant in their fishing trips. Today, she is the executive director of the Outdoor Writers of America and also writes a cooking column for Field and Stream.
At 19, Bashline doubted he would become a writer of anything.
“I was asked to leave the journalism school at Penn State,” he said. “I was sort of informed that my grammar was so poor that I should strongly consider some other line of work.”
He enrolled in art school in Buffalo, N.Y., where he honed his skills as a watercolor artist. But he admits to not being a dedicated artist.
“When you’re 19 and you get a chance to paint naked women, you take it,” he said.
After a few years of working as a free-lance writer and selling manuscripts to magazines, his talent led him to New York, where he became managing editor of Field and Stream. That job lasted just two years, however.
“One morning on the commuter train I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ It was a long ways from the green hills of Pennsylvania.”
His travels have taken him to many parts of the world. One trip stands out, he said: a fly-fishing expedition to Chile in 1986.
“Chile, not Alaska, holds the world’s largest trout,” Bashline said. “The chances of catching a 10-pound rainbow or brown trout on a fly rod are much greater in Chile than Alaska. They are beautiful fish, and there’s no competition for them yet.
“The very first trout I caught on my trip was a 12-pound rainbow. It jumped like a salmon . . . a great, strong fish. I figured if that was common, I might just stay on there for the rest of my life, maybe as a chef in the Chilean army. I did, however, have to leave.
“What a place!”
What a job!