21st century angling | Eat, Sleep, Fish

Bruno Vincent from Westcountry Rivers Trust introduces a great new app for the fly angler

There’s a problem with angling. We’re too old, too male, too stuck in our ways. A horrible generalisation, but one that I hope you recognise.

The more commercial among us are leveraging a more youthful culture of fishing with Vlogs, snapchat and the like or perhaps trying to turn the tap on more women in our sport with things like Orvis’ 50:50 on the Water campaign.

Working in angling development for the Westcountry Rivers Trust I can’t turn my nose up at anything that gives our industry a leg up towards a more progressive 21^st century image. I can however rant with the best of us about the modernisation of this pursuit, doing my best to sound like I’m a good 20 years older that I am, but the status quo of a sadly diminishing sport is not something to nurture. I’m of a firm belief that a guide must earn their stripes, years on the river, perhaps as an underkeeper, honing and developing not just the mechanics and watercraft needed for fly fishing but also the local knowledge that augments their skill to provide the best experience to their guests. This may well cement fly fishing as we know it but it does nothing to progress and improve fly fishing. Young anglers are needed to attract young anglers, women anglers are equally essential to get new recruits on the bank.

Having picked up fly fishing again in the last few years, my figurative youth(ish) and old man’s demeanour give me a slightly schizophrenic outlook. Cane rods, tweed and traditional dries fished upstream one minute, carbon, Gore-Tex and Euro Nymphing the next. All I really know is the benefit I receive from time on the river, something I want to impress on anyone I can.

I really don’t care if someone wants to book a day on the Test or find an urban river that can be fished for free, either is preferable to the demise of our sport. With luck the latter will lead to the former as it did in my case, not that I get to the Test much.

Fly fishing has somewhat earned the image of an elitist sport for the landed gentry and the echoes of the time when this was true, still govern much of the access. Approachable, affordable fishing has managed to weave its place into the mosaic of sporting estates, but without the funds for marketing and administration that come with the premium day tickets, much is secured by raffle tickets, carbon copy day tickets and cash stored in an ice cream tub beneath the bar of the local free house. Though the old man in me finds pleasure in these simpler ways, I can equally find the process awkward and frankly unnecessary. If we want a new younger bread of anglers to keep the sport alive, relying on pens, paper and cash (all things the average millennial has done away with) is a hindrance we cannot afford.

Twenty years ago, Westcountry Angling Passport, or Angling 2000 as it was known then, addressed some of these issues allowing access in a more spontaneous, ad hoc way to waters across Devon and Cornwall that were previously inaccessible. Pre-buying tokens in bulk and using them without notice increased the availability of fishing across our two counties. Farms and holiday cottages with river frontage suddenly became viable beats. However, pens and paper are still necessary, so we have spent the last year distilling the essence of the Passport into a mobile app eradicating the need for these antiquated methods (I am writing this in black ink on a lined A4 pad).

Fish Pass, as we have dubbed it, enables people, young and old, to buy tokens, find a beat, redeem fishing and file a catch return all from the familiar ‘black mirror’ that fishing will hopefully encourage them to finally put back in their pocket. Our hope is the familiar medium of the smartphone will kick away a couple of the barriers that twenty-something anglers may face. Keeping them informed of the byelaws and seasons and providing the kind of navigation details that the sat nav generation are used to.

Future iterations of the app will combine elements like social media sharing, live ratings and catch returns so beats can be chosen by recent pressure and then the resulting successes published to friends, family and perhaps the next hopeful fly fisher. We can’t ignore our current customers and so the design has been led by clarity, legibility and ease of use for the less app-literate among us, so hopefully it is something that everyone can use. With a little luck this could be a helping hand to introducing young people to our sport and keeping clubs alive.