Dear readers,

Hopefully everyone is having a good fall season and getting into some fish. I want to start off by apologizing for the delay of the final installment of the New York regional recap series. I’ve been preoccupied the last few months moving and starting a new job, but part four is mostly done and hopefully will be up next week. I have some other good stuff coming along in the pipeline too, so stay tuned.

In the meantime- a few weeks back my friends at Cortland asked me to write up an overview of competitive fly fishing for the company blog. I think it ended up being a pretty good intro for those that aren’t familiar with the sport, so I wanted to drop it here as well. If you’ve ever been interested in learning more about or getting involved with fly fishing competitions in the U.S., you should definitely give it a read. I added a little excerpt below:

“Competitive fly fishing has rapidly become a bigger part of mainstream fly fishing culture in the United States over the last decade or so. Not that long ago many anglers had no idea there was a Team USA fly fishing, or that there was any sort of organized competitive fishing in the US at all. Now, even though only a small fraction of anglers compete, the industry is flooded with competition-style equipment and tactics. Despite this, a large portion of the angling community still only has a surface-level understanding of competition angling and how it all works.

History

Though anglers have likely been competing in one way or another since the inception of the sport, modern competitive fly fishing came around in the early 1980s with the first World Fly Fishing Championship held in Luxembourg. Shortly after, the governing body of competitive fly fishing, FIPS-Mouche, was formed to oversee the continuation of these international events.

The U.S. has been competing on the world stage since nearly the beginning, with a number of notable anglers serving on its earlier teams. American anglers began to take note of competition angling and its related tactics by the mid-2000s. Small competitions following some of the rules set by FIPS began popping up in the U.S. and gained a sizable following by the early twenties. These laid the groundwork for the more organized competition system in place today…”

To continue reading, click here: Cortlandline.com

Thanks!

-Mike Komara