Don’t expect to be taught anything. Don’t expect peace and serenity. Don’t expect much in the way of narrative. Do expect loads of trout, loads of music (often brash, more foreground than background), stunning locations … and more fish.

Four twenty-something trout bums fish and film their way through Argentina (mostly Patagonia, almost Chile, frustrated in Tierra del Fuego). As far as story goes, that’s it! Great footage of fish and fishing, mostly of the take and slightly less playing and presenting the trophy to the camera, fair amount of linking shots and scenery. Image quality is good. Editing is fast and choppy; think music video, don’t think lingering nostalgic, romantic, sentimental.

We all know fly-fishing is exciting, long on anticipation, then moments of intense action. Most, if not all, fishing DVD’s and videos fail to get that across – heavy on the nostalgia, sights and flowers, low on thrills. Trout Bum Diaries (TBD) is set to change that.

Styled after extreme sports videos (snowboarding, mountain biking and the like) the Angling Exploration Group have set out to do similar with fishing. More power to their elbows! Fishing is exciting and it’s about time a DVD represented it that way.

Trout Bum Diaries Vol 1, almost achieves that aim. This looks like a diary but isn’t, diaries don’t have ponderous, pompous narrators, dairies do give readers or viewers insight into the people making them and, simply thanks to dates at the tops of pages, they have structure. TBD has a narrator but no discernable structure.

Over the near two hours of TBD the narrator began to irritate me and I have absolutely no idea who or what the main players, the Trout Bums, are like. I know they can catch fish, that’s about it. During that time I realised they (since they filmed, edited and produced this) like some music that annoys me – not all, but some. I’ve watched TBD through twice now so I know when I need to turn down the sound and edit the music, the narrator (who I’d happily shoot) and his ghastly attempts at narrative comments is less easy to edit out.
Apart from catching trout (brook, rainbow, brown and sea trout) I really know nothing about these guys and less about their “expedition”. They tell me it was a 5-month journey; I get no sense of that during the DVD. I see them catch loads of fish and see them break their Jeep a lot; that could all happen on one day.

TBD offers no teaching, no half-baked introduction to fly-fishing or cheesy explanation of what they’re doing, clearly they expect their audience to be anglers – to be their equals. As a viewer/angler that appeals to me.

Fishing documentaries are mostly directed, produced, edited and/or marketed by non-anglers, who believe their audience will be as ignorant as them – it’s not true! The vast majority of people don’t fish, that’s no reason to believe they will be the one’s buying the end product, why would they? What those producers make is a DVD that introduces fly-fishing to people who are not interested in the subject and have no reason to buy the DVD in the first place. What we anglers, who actually do want and do buy fishing DVDs, get is something aimed at novices at best, and for complete non-anglers at worst.

The Angling Exploration Group has that bit absolutely right. Make a DVD that entertains and excites, set it to loud rock music if you must, oh, and catch loads of trout!

Trout Bum Diaries is well worth seeing, unlike the vast majority of fishing DVDs it’s aimed at anglers, guys who get excited by fish and fly-fishing.