What Will Shape the Future of Fly Fishing?
A highly speculative look into the future of fly fishing
Gink and Gasoline has years of interesting insights on fly fishing, and a recent re-run overlapped with an idea I’ve been bouncing around for a while.
Gink and Gasoline: What is the Future of Fly Fishing?
Yet, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the angle Gink and Gasoline took when considering the future of fly fishing. To me they got caught up in the personalities and the magnetism of how media carries one into the spotlight and shapes those individuals. Frankly, that's not an interesting peek into the future of fly fishing.
Instead, when I think about the future of fly fishing, I wonder what happens to the fish, the waters, the destinations, the gear? Step through the dimensional shifting door as we draw a connection between current trends and their future implications.
Crystal Ball
- Factors like climate variability, increased precipitation in some areas, decreased in others, premature runoff, low warm temperatures in late summer, will each alter the landscape enough to the point where some famous historic fisheries no longer hold their reputation.
- Clear floating fly lines should probably be here to stay. I've been testing a tropical clear floater on some local carp and have noticed an improvement in spooking fish when my line lands over their heads. I'd bet they stick around, and offer some interesting new applications we haven’t discovered yet.
- Where's the breaking point with crowded rivers? Will stillwater trout finally gain a foothold for reliable trout fishing away from pressured rivers? The euro influence is finally spreading, I'm not talking about euro-nymphing. I'm talking about tactics on stillwaters. I think at some point it has to stick, especially when Fly Fish Food, Tactical Fly Fisher, and Phil Rowley continue their push.
- Rod makers will embrace modular rods (moving away from expensive custom repairs and delays to match your exact rod). Rod pieces will be generalized, and so sooner or later... different flex rod sections will become available and interchangeable to customize your rod experience: fast/med/slow tips, or mid-sections, or butt sections.
- Too much pressure on rivers with boats, guides, and tourism will overwhelm places like Montana, Wyoming, and even New Zealand into some kind of (controversial) permitting system. It will not be popular and pit two competing ideologies against each other: right to public access vs maintaining healthy fisheries.
- Private money continues to buy up big chunks of pristine nature for either richy-rich playgrounds or for development, despite growing populations of outdoor recreation. Just look at what's happening on the lower Blue River.
- New settings pop up for species, ex: tarpon cruising further up Atlantic coast, snakehead crawl further into new watersheds.
- Western reservoir construction for water storage reignites a tailwater push to maintain coldwater fisheries and supplement drinking water reserves. Ex: expect new tailwaters to pop-up supporting a thirsty Denver.
- Most connective habitat for cutthroat is lost, they only remain in isolated pockets.
- Trout lose title as main focus of fly fishing, outside of small Rocky Mountain refugia.