Gearing up
Before you can fish you have to have at least the basic equipment. In Gridania visit Humphrey in the Rosewood Stalls. He provides both Fishing and Mining supplies.
You'll need at least the following to get started:
Weathered Fishing Rod
The fishing rod is equipped to your Main slot.
660 gil
For fishing in rivers, ponds, or streams you'll need:
Stack of Bloodworms
This is a bait that equips to your Pack slot
99 x 3 gil = 297 gil
For ocean fishing you'll need:
Stack of Lugworm
This is also bait that equips to your Pack slot
99 x 3 gil = 297 gil
The fishing secondary can also be purchased here:
Bronze Gig
The Bronze Gig equips to your Offhand slot (sub)
936 gil
I believe this is used in spear fishing.
Abilities
Before we get to the actual fishing, there's a few things you need to know about being a fisher. Mostly your available actions:
Stone Throw
Simply put you pick up a stone and throw it. You only deal 1 point of damage however. Don't think this will bring anything down. All it does is annoy them.
Wrist Flick
Now here's the reason you have Stone Throw. Used in combination this will stun your attacker momentarily. This gives you a few seconds to run away and equip something a little more useful.
Gulleye
One of two abilities you get early on in fishing. This tells you the nearest school of fish available to catch. It tells you the general direction and the distance you are from them in Yalms.
Dowse
This is similar to Gulleye however this gives you the general overview of the area your in telling you how many schools of fish in several directions. Useful when you're trying to see what else is out there to fish up.
Okay, now we have that out of the way let's get our feet wet and actually fish.
Basics of Fishing
To start out, begin by visiting the nearest body of water. This can be a pond in the middle of Gridania or the rivers and streams outside. When you get near or in the water you'll notice a symbol along the top of the screen indicating there is an interaction available.
Bring up your menu and select Fish:
Once you've cast your line, you'll be presented with an option to set your depth.
This simply indicates what level of the water your searching in. If for any reason you don't get a nibble or bite, you'll want to change your depth to see if you can find fish.
Once your lure sinks to your designated depth, the waiting game begins. It'll takes a few seconds but you'll get one of three possible responses. A nibble, a bite, or nothing at all. If you get a nibble or bite, you'll be given two options, wait or jig.
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Choosing wait will allow for either a nibble to turn into a bite but this can backfire too so use this with caution.
The second option is jig. Jig is to get the fish to bite and initiate the golf-swing meter. This meter will have a blue dot which will go back and forth along the meter. You have to tell it to stop before it'll tell you a result of your jig. The golf meter represents the angle upon which you jig the line. Based on what I've read and what I've tried, the best zones to stop the first dot is to the left or right of the word 'Cast'. Once stopped, the meter turns orange.
The response will tell you roughly how well the jig worked:
You've hooked something but cannot reel it in.
I'm really not sure but I think this is the initial sign that your roughly on the right track and you'll need to go left or right of that position to begin reeling in the fish.
The fish is taking line.
You've gone a little bit in the wrong direction and the fish is getting some slack.
You take in some line.
Your getting close to the right spot.
You take in a great deal of line.
Your very close to the right spot.
As you use jig or wait, you'll notice a meter called Remainder shrink.
If this hits zero before you can reel in the fish, you'll lose the fish. That being said, if your weakened from getting KO'd, wait before doing any fishing else you just end up wasting bait.
Another thing to note, if you hear a bell or chime when your fishing and see a glow at the tip of your fishing pole, you'll want to land the next jig right on top of where you last where. This usually pulls in the fish.
Hopefully this'll get you started fishing. Hopefully I can add more to this or someone can make a much ore involved guide.
Spearfishing
Oh yes, if you are curious what the glowing gather point in the water is for, this is spearfishing. This requires the secondary tool to be able to harvest this point. Surprising to say that even though you have all these elaborate mini-game for fishing, spearfishing is just that. You whip out the bronze gig and you auto harvest. So far from my attempts, it's been mostly frogs and bugs, which i guess you can use for fishing as well.
Other Helpful things to know...
Since fishing is a job by itself, it's a bit of a pain to manually switch equipment around. There's a trick available that'll make it easy.
Bring up the menu and go to configurations. Among the list is the option for Macros, You can build a macro that can equip all your fishing gear as well as your actions.
Here's a sample of the macro I use:
/echo Switching to Fishing Gear
/equip main "Weathered Fishing Rod"
/equip sub "Bonze Gig"
/equip pack Lugworm
/equipaction 2 "Wrist Flick"
/equipaction 3 "Gulleye"
/equipaction 4 "Dowse"
For more information about macros, check out Maiev's article on Macros: