Let's face it, fly fishing isn't growing in fact, it is shrinking. Can we do anything? James Beeson thinks so.
‘If you had a time machine would you travel to the future or the past?’
That was one of the light entertainment questions I had to ask new members of staff for a profile piece in the company newsletter. Nobody ever asked me that question, and for a while I wouldn’t have known what to tell them if they had. I mean, do you choose to go back to some pivotal moment of human history or forwards to see where it all will end? Today I know exactly what I would do, I would go back and stop J.R. Hartley.
If you’re under thirty you will probably have no idea what I’m talking about. If you’re under thirty then you’re a pretty rare thing in fly fishing, and that’s a problem. For those of you too young to know or too old to remember, J.R. Hartley was the star of a TV advert for Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages was a telephone directory. Which was sort of like a local Internet only heavier and printed in a book. The advert was a sepia toned cardigan fest in which our hero was an older gentleman just about able to use a telephone. He was shown calling various shops searching for a book called ‘Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley’. When he eventually found a shop that had a copy the joke was revealed, the old man was J.R. Hartley himself. Why he was looking for a book he’d written was never explained, surely he might have kept a copy or two for himself? Unless of course he was determinedly collecting all the copies and slowly filling up his house with them. That bit doesn’t really matter, what does matter is that this advert portrayed the sport of fly fishing as something on a par with Werther’s Original. It was for eccentric old men, an anachronism, something to be consigned to the same dusty old room of the past that contains the telegram, the gramophone, and the typewriter.
The worst part is the truth of it, that we fly fishers are dying out.
The biggest problem we have is the image of the sport. Salmon fishing suffers especially, giving the impression that if you don’t have tweed underpants and a peerage it’s not for you. The trout bum helps out a little but still isn’t as recognised over here as it is in The States, and they already have the super cool Steelheaders with skater style, Skagit lines, and Spey rods. Things are a bit easier in Scandinavia too, where just as in the US being outdoors is seen as a normal part of life rather than something for eccentric fresh-air fetishists who are apparently unaware that you don’t need to walk/swim/fish/shoot because there are perfectly good roads to most places and food comes from supermarkets in plastic wrappers. Now of course we don’t have the same access to public land and water as they do in the US, but we can’t do a lot about that - unless anyone else is willing to re-fight the Battle of Hastings and throw off the yoke of our Norman overlords? Just me then…again.
For the record, I’m not saying that you can’t wear a Barbour and a flat cap - just that you shouldn’t have to. You should be allowed to wear what you like, and that’s going to be different for everyone. What we need is more diversity in how fly fishing is represented. We need more photos and stories of younger people fishing taken and written by younger people. The human race is extremely impressionable - if you show me old men as the face of fly fishing then I’m going to think that I need to be an old man to take part. The media, as ever, has a big role to play.
There might be a very small number in our ranks that welcome the declining numbers, seeing it as a case of more water and more fish for them. That may even be true in the short term, but the long term prognosis is bleak. If there are less of us fishing then there are less of us to fight pollution, abstraction, exploitation and all the other threats to our fisheries. The less we are in number the less we have a voice, and in a time of ever declining salmon and sea trout runs with ever increasing pressure on wild spaces, that can only be a bad thing for all of us.
It’s easy to blame the youth for not taking an interest in fly fishing - with their video games and their mobile telephones (thanks Grandad) - but it doesn’t help us any. We can’t compete with the video game industry, we don’t have their marketing budget. And anyway, what are we doing to try and encourage more young people into the sport in the first place? I know some of the fishing clubs in my area are struggling for new members, but that’s hardly a surprise when they’re charging upwards of £400 for membership. (For the record an Xbox One retails at £300.) We need some pioneering clubs to take the initiative and offer things like a free week’s fishing for children and parents around the school holidays. We are conditioned to the try-before-you-buy mentality so why not let some fresh blood take your water for a test drive? If only a small percentage go on to become members it would still be well worth it.
There are some trends we could piggy-back on too, like sustainable organic harvest for the hipster foodies or the mental wellbeing benefits of a break from work pressures while reconnecting with nature. Fly fishing is an excellent meditative tool, psychologists call it effortless attention - your brain is sufficiently occupied it can’t worry about work but not so occupied as to be emitting steam. Hell, we could even wheel good old J.R. Hartley again but update him with a steampunk vibe and some bionic implants.
Carp and coarse fishing seem to be able to attract a reasonable amount of younger anglers so it’s not an impossible task. (We might even be able to persuade a few of them to pick up a fly rod occasionally if we go about it the right way.) There is a fantastic tradition and heritage to British fly fishing but we must take care not to let that drift into a perception of elitism. We can all do something to help out, whether it’s introducing a neighbour or friend to the sport, volunteering on club days for new members, or writing something inspirational for Eat, Sleep, Fish. You’re going to have to do something though because I’m too busy fishing to build that time machine.
