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It'll get a little bigger and more silly commercially for awhile yet, then lose the flush of me-too newbies very rapidly.

Just be thankful, fellas, that the Smart Set Fly Boys have no interest in barbel: I saw the Poor Man's Great Game Fish (sea-trout) taken up and taken by the Smart Set, here and abroad; it wasn't pretty. Just be thankful.

PS - Wessex (avon) barbel-fishers watch out: the salmon are on their way back.

a warning, of sorts, that I posted recently on another, mostly fly, forum (one from which I have not been conveniently banned). Read what a young American fly-fisher had to say about what a comparatively few, wealthy, mostly old fart, but very powerful "fishers" have done in a little more than a decade to his (and my other) pastime -


Complete Fisher Forum, Thu May 24, 2007 10:59am, Paul Boote:

Subject: "Pukka fly-fishing sahib"

A line from Razaka, a lovely, elderly, be-robed Muslim gillie, after watching me (shorts, flipflops, T-shirt, earring) fish his river on the first of many many days in the summer of 1980.

Just what is a "Pukka fly-fishing sahib" nowadays, I wonder?

Saw this on my internet travels today. Made me think about fly-fishing's future - how it's got to be if it's going to survive -


www.projo.com/sports/tomm...ef29e.html


Sansoucy champions fly-fishing’s new breed

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

BY TOM MEADE

Journal Sports Writer


CHARLESTOWN — Ryan Sansoucy is not your typical New England fly-fisherman. There is nothing Orvis or L.L. Bean about him, not with all the tattoos, the nickel-sized holes in his ears, the rapper cap and hoodie.

The typical New England fly-fisherman with his khakis, tweeds, pipe and single-malt Scotch is yesterday.

Ryan Sansoucy is tomorrow.

“People look at me and they think I’m like some hooligan drug dealer,” says the 26-year-old fishing guide. “Actually, I’m just the opposite: a Bible-thumping Christian kid who’s really conservative.”

Those tattoos?

A depiction of the New Testament’s Revelations on his left arm. On his neck: “Drug-Free.” Ankle: A citation from the Gospel of Matthew, about becoming fishers of men.

One side of Sansoucy is the soft-spoken dude who named his guiding service Hush Fly Fishing because there is too much noise in the world and, as a result, he says, “A lot of people never listen to their passions, and they get stuck in the routines of life. Hush. Listen to your passions.”

Another side is the self-professed adrenaline junkie, the guy who has been in three major accidents, including a recent motorcycle crash at 70 mph. The snowboarder. The tournament paint-ball player. The mountain biker who takes suicidal jumps. The flats-boat pilot who had a lot of fishermen fuming on Ninigret Pond until another fishing guide told him to slow down.

Sansoucy started fishing when he was a youngster, growing up on the shores of a lake.

“My mom introduced me to fishing at the age of three,” he says. “Three to five times a day, I’d run down to the water and cast to largemouth bass. I had my own little boat, and started fly-fishing when I was nine and inherited an old Fenwick fiberglass fly rod. I taught myself to cast with the old, original line. As I got older, I started to buy better equipment and got interested in both freshwater and saltwater fly fishing.”

Sansoucy started guiding freshwater and surf fishermen in 2001, and he earned his captain’s license two years ago. He says he spent $4,000 on the research for a business plan that led to Hush Fly Fishing. The data, he says, show that the future of fly-fishing, in particular, rests in the arms of his generation, Generation Y.

“The future is huge,” he says. “There is a large number of fly-fishermen that rock-climb and mountain-bike and skateboard and do things that are cooler than fly-fishing, but they’re still passionate about it.”

The problem with fly-fishing, he says, is the arrogance of the old guard. Newcomers to fly-fishing, he contends, “try to learn, and they run into some arrogant, snotty guy on the water who thinks they’re idiots because they can’t roll cast or because they’re just starting out.”

Sancoucy’s Web site, www.hushfishing.com, addresses the issue: “This is a rebuke to you arrogant, stuck-up anglers,” it says. “Get over yourself [and] stop pushing people away from the same thing you claim to love for the sake of your own pride.”

Fly-fishing is easy and inexpensive, but the fly-fishing establishment complicates the learning process, Sansoucy says.

“We’re lacking fathers in our generation so, without anyone to show them, a lot of people have to learn on their own,” he says. “That’s an opportunity to teach people that fly-fishing is cool. Unfortunately, you’ve got all these people running around with $4,000 in equipment and MBAs and they talk like fly-fishing is some psycho-scientific impossible thing to achieve, some lost art. I try to make it simple.”

All you need to know are a couple of knots and a handful of generic flies for the kind of fishing you plan to do, Sansoucy says.

“You have to make fly-fishing more accessible,” he says. “You don’t want old guys from the Fly Fishing Federation ...who don’t know how to talk to a skateboarder who’s passionate about fly-fishing. They’re going to make [the discussion] like a math quiz. They’re going to complicate it.”

The recruiters are missing the boat, Sansoucy says, contending that his generation holds the future of fly-fishing.

S-o-o-o-o short-term and selfish English.

If we ALL want to survive past, "like" tormorrow, the Greedy Boys (as well the seemingly irredeemable British "chavs", brought up short and "taught" to be responsible, contributing citizens - eventually) are going to have to forge some sort of future. Personally, I would rather stop fishing tomorrow (and, literally, smash every last piece of my fishing tackle) than go the "What the f***, it's past a solution now, so I'll buy myself some comfort and privacy till I pop it" route.