If there's one thing this game has taught me it's that I have a short attention span. It's also possible that is caused by playing the game as well.
In any case, if there's a solo activity that is boring me, I won't do it for long. I'll do boring stuff in a group to help others, but my own grinding activities tend to happen in short spurts.
For this reason, I have never had a character with max level fishing. The few times I tried to fish, I was struck down with boredom almost immediately.
Enter WotLK. I leveled my cooking to the new cap and provided my own buff food for raids, but then people started bringing Fish Feast. The fisherpeople in the guild were suddenly spreading feasts all over, and I felt guilty as hell. I was determined when I started Leesah that I would make a fisherwoman out of her. It must be the closet "provider" type in me.
I'll share something with you that I only found out recently:
You can level your fishing in any pool.
You can fish in the pond in Mulgore or in the Stormwind canals or wherever and level your fishing to 450 if you want to.
If you fish in an area that requires fishing higher than your current fishing level, you won't catch any fish. You'll catch weeds, tattered cloth and other random junk, but you will still get skill-ups in fishing.
If you fish in areas lower than your current fishing skill (when added to any bait you have used such as Nightcrawlers or Shiny Bauble), you will (most of the time) catch fish, and that is where it really comes in handy for leveling up your cooking at the same time. There are different fish habitats and schools all over Azeroth, and if you fish in the right place, you'll catch fish you can level cooking with.
Sometimes if you're really lucky, you can fish up treasure, or even pets!
I used this guide at Almost Gaming - Fishing & Cooking Guide. It tells you where to catch fish and where to get the recipes to cook them. While leveling my cooking I had a generous stock of different meats in my bank (jeez it was whiffy in there by the time I got around to it), so my cooking got ahead of the guide a bit, but I was able to fish the areas where I needed to catch fish to level cooking.
Once I reached 300 cooking I stopped fishing for a while because after leveling two characters through Outland and Northrend I had all the meat I needed to get up to 400 cooking.
I thought that getting to a high enough level of fishing to be able to fish in Northrend would take hours of pain, but for some reason now with only 250 fishing, I am able to catch fish in Wintergrasp with the Sharpened Fish Hook. I'm not sure why that is, because according to Cromulent I shouldn't be able to fish there until level 430 and even with the hook and Nat Pagle's, that only puts me up to 370. Did they recently drop the requirements for Northrend or something? Not that I'm complaining!
I've started doing the fishing dailies both in Outland and in Dalaran now. It will be a long grind up to 450 but I'll get there on the dailies. Plus I can fish in Wintergrasp and that's where the ingredients for Fish Feast are found. Now to get my cooking up to 450...
I'm almost a provider again!
