A number of anglers fish with the intensity of a linebacker on fourth and one, while a select group look at fishing as an excuse to kick back and drink beer ... not that they really need one.

The General
This type of fisherman looks at fishing as a battle campaign. The night before a fishing expedition, the General pores over the charts of the fishing grounds and carefully constructs a plan of attack. Reveille is at 0400, and after a ration of beef jerky and black coffee, he boards his Hummer H2 and heads for the lake to launch his camouflage-painted Jon boat. It's still dark, but that's why they make night-vision goggles. The General has an amazing arsenal of weapons of bass destruction and isn't afraid to use them. The key is to keep on the move and strike hard and fast. Sometimes this approach works, and other times he reels in just a pair of fish lips, thanks to the massive hook-setting power of his Magnum Kevlar fishing pole and 50-pound-test Spiderwire. At the end of the day, the body count of dead fish thrown onto the dock tells him whether the mission was a success or not.

The Annalist
If only your financial adviser had the same attention to detail as this angler, you could retire at 50. It all started harmlessly enough when he started keeping records in a journal as a kid. Now, everything is broken down in the research phase of planning a fishing trip: Past excursions are cataloged based on date, weather, water clarity, ph level, lures used and moon phase. The trouble with this much research is that he keeps finding strange correlations that he's not sure are relevant, like the fact he has caught more and larger bass when Republicans control the Senate, but only when the Democrats rule the House, and then only during a leap year. Throw in oblique factors like shirt color and hair length, and he sometimes gets paralyzed with too much information. After doing the calculations, he's just as likely to bag an upcoming trip after the data indicates that he'll only catch two fish: a 0.75-pound bass and a bream the size of the average cell phone in 2004.

The Keep-it-Simple, Keep-it-Fun Angler
This attitude has the other two totally baffled. Fishing just for the fun of it? What kind of maniac is this? The Keep-It-Simple Angler makes all of his decisions based on a pass/fail method: would it be fun or not. This leads him to do some weird things, like instead of fishing on the rough windswept shoreline where the bait should be pinned against the bank, he fishes in the lee and rolls up his sleeves to get a better tan while he cracks the top on a beer. He doesn't go in for all this fancy gear that he sees everyone re-mortgaging their house to get; he owns three rods and reels: a 20-year-old Ambassador 5000 that's strapped onto a Shakespeare Ugly Stick, because you can't break the dagum thing, and two spinning rigs he got on sale at Wal-Mart. Those fancy electronics might be great and all, but his flasher tells him all he needs to know. His only measure of a successful fishing day is to decide whether it was better than going to work.