Why Fly Fishing Needs a Bold Rebrand

In a world driven by instant results and diminishing attention spans, fly fishing faces a growing identity crisis.

Photograph: Chandler Bondurant

Expert scientists believe that the Earth we know was born in a massive cataclysm. The theory goes that 4.4 billion years ago, Earth had a sibling planet named Theia, roughly the size of Mars. After eons of orbiting around one another, they eventually collided. Theia was completely obliterated, the impact shattering her into a cloud of ore and rock. Earth was turned into a wobbling molten orb.

The byproduct was two fold: Earth, now tilted at 23 degrees, was suddenly capable of having seasons. What remained of Theia was pulled together by gravity to form our moon.

Life began with the emergence of the first microbes around 3.5 billion years ago. Hominids, the family that includes humans, appeared much later. The earliest known hominid species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, lived around 7 million years ago. Bipedalism, or walking on two legs, is believed to have evolved between 7 to 6 million years ago.

Linguists believe that Sanskrit, the oldest known language, is 5,000 to 7,000 years old.

Galileo was born less than 500 years ago. The Wright Brothers took wing at Kitty Hawk 121 years ago. We launched the first telecom satellite in 1962. Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser in 1990. The iPhone is only seventeen years old. Instagram, fourteen. Seven years ago, The Economist published an article stating that data had surpassed oil in value. Recent tallies suggest that about one third of Americans are almost constantly on their phones, and the majority of Gen Z aspires to be social media influencers.

A goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. Today, the average adult can only manage eight. If you’re still reading, congratulations, you’re in the top ten percent of the entire human race.

While the world spins faster and our attention wanes, American fly fishing is struggling to find its feet leaving more than a century of angling history, knowledge, and practice hanging in the balance.

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They Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To

Isaak Walton is the indisputable primogenitor of modern angling’s school of thought, if such a thing exists. His opus, The Compleat Angler, written in 1653, still underpins the way we perceive fly fishing, especially trout fishing. His pastoral prose is saturated with the soul of British chalk streams nearly a century before the Industrial Revolution left its indelible mark.

Much of what he wrote still applies today. He speaks of paying attention to fish behavior, weather patterns, and water conditions; learning from experience and adapting to changing fishing conditions; and developing a special attention to detail when selecting fly patterns. Read any how-to article from the last hundred years and you’ll find Isaak Walton’s words bleeding through.

Walton also wrote widely about the importance of patience. He instructs the angler to be “quiet and patient” and reminds us that “there is no need of hurrying.” He describes the “great judgment required in the time when to fish for a trout, and how to fish for him” but warns that “he that hopes to be a good angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience.”

Our modern capacity for patience is waning, whether we like it or not. Our attention spans are being eroded away by the social media industrial complex. DoorDash and Amazon have chiseled away at our ability to delay gratification. People used to wait for a cab, then came Uber. People used to hire travel agents, now the world is at your fingertips thanks to AirBnB. Quickness and ease have become the norm.

If you consider that Walton would have handwritten his great work by candle light with a goose-quill pen, it's not hard to imagine that the patience of which he spoke was deeper and longer lasting than what we can even fathom today. With the modern attention span on the fritz, the path to being the ‘compleat angler’ is more challenging than it's ever been.

A Means to an End

At the same time, the angler’s tools have become far more effective, and cheaper to produce and maintain. A modern graphite rod can be rolled in minutes and factories pump out fly line by the mile. Lines perform better, in a wider range of conditions, and require little to no maintenance. A CnC’d reel is carved from aluminum stock in the fraction of the time it would have taken the skilled machinist. Clothing and equipment is warmer, lighter, and more resistant to weather and wind. Flies, once tied on forged hooks by the angler, are purchased by the boxful with the tap of a finger.

The vogue in fly fishing has also shifted to a more tactical form of fly fishing. Euro nymphing has stormed onto the scene in the last few years, proliferating an extremely effective means of hooking fish, especially in fast-moving pocket water and riffles, the precise areas where trout seek refuge from aerial predators and high water temperatures. High-profile anglers like George Daniel are ditching fly lines altogether, spooling their reels with straight monofilament. These “borderline spin fishing” tactics catch more fish, more often.

Simply put, today’s fly angler can enter the sport more easily, enjoy increasingly effective tactics and tools, and do so in more austere conditions than at any time in the history of the sport. This boom in technology means that more fish are under more angling pressure than ever before. It also leads to an irksome Catch-22.

Photograph: Chris Wright

Anglers tend to be the most outspoken advocates for fresh and saltwater conservation efforts. There is also a positive correlation between enthusiasm and conservation engagement. Trout Unlimited, the national non-profit organization with the mission of conserving, protecting, and restoring cold water fisheries and their watersheds, grew its membership from 150,000 in 2018 to over 350,000 in 2022. Last year alone, TU reported having more than 400 nationwide chapters which contributed nearly 600,000 volunteer hours — valued at roughly $18 million — on projects that ranged from local stream restoration to the largest dam removal in history on the Klamath River.

There is no doubt that an enthusiastic user base is good for conservation. Still, no one is out there creating more wild places. And as demand for fishing access grows, anglers wishing to avoid crowded pull-offs are forced to venture into remote areas or fish during off-peak times of the year. And with gear and tactics that make their success more likely, there is nothing stopping them from taking the plunge. It stands to reason that this ever-widening usage of the natural resource will necessitate broader scopes of stream restoration and preservation.

There may be no better advocate for clean, healthy fisheries than enthusiastic anglers, but at what cost? And for how long?

The Myth of the Merciful Hunter

Lee Wulff is often credited with popularizing the idea of catch-and-release fishing in the United States. He was undoubtedly one of only a handful of anglers during the 1930s who’d observed widespread fishery decline and spoke up about altering angling practices. It wasn’t until 1952 that Michigan became the first state to formalize the concept, citing the costs of stocking hatchery-raised fish. Gradually other states followed, and now, “no-kill” zones are common across the US. But just like Walton, one doubts Wulff could have imagined the state of fly fishing today when he famously said “game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.”

What was once an earnest attempt at getting anglers to think twice about harvesting fish has become a kind of angling duct tape that modern anglers are all too happy to apply to any outing; as long as you let the fish go, no harm is done.

The truth is, we know very little about how being caught and handled affects a fish. Longitudinal studies don’t exist or haven’t been concluded, and focused studies often have widely varying results owing to differences in habitat, species, and the type of fishing. What is conclusive, however, is that angling pressure has some impact on fish survivability; any fish you land is more likely to die than if you hadn’t hooked it in the first place.

In the context of his time, Wulff’s aphorism was pioneering, earnest, and sensible. But nearly a century later, we’re still applying it, and liberally, to a sport that is growing in size and scope at an alarming rate. Between 2019 to 2023, roughly a million anglers joined the national tally, and participation rates have jumped from less than 3% to more than 7%. Several states have relaxed their fly fishing seasons, allowing catch and release on waterways previously closed from November through April. And with an iPhone in every wader pocket, more fish are being handled longer for grip-and-grins and the capture of social media content.

Catch and release might have been a viable solution to the threats of former generations, but in light of modern challenges it’s beginning to feel like a hackneyed panacea in desperate need of modernization.

Angling as a Practice

The Japanese martial art of archery is called Kyūdō. Much like the other martial arts handed down by the Samurai, Kyūdō has been shaped into a spiritual and educational practice that is quite removed from its combat origins. The target, for example, is secondary to the art of loosing the arrow. Kyūdō practitioners refer to themselves as yumihiki or ‘one who draws the bow.’ Quite different from ‘one who shoots the arrow’ or more pointedly, ‘one who hits the target.

Today the aim of a Kyūdō practice is to achieve a state of acting without conscious thought and being fully immersed in the moment called mushin, or “no-mind.” The simple act of drawing the bow and releasing the arrow is a form of active meditation where true mastery is achieved through the alignment of mind, body, and spirit. Hitting the target is a result of this harmony, not the point of it. This relationship is summarized in the term seisha hicchū, or “true shooting, certain hitting.”

One could be forgiven for believing that ‘hitting the target’ is the modern angler’s sole purpose. Images of trophy fish adorn magazine covers and website home pages. Grip and grins photographs are a kind of currency that translate likes into followers and followers into fame. To spend a day on the water without catching a fish is a punishment so devastating that most would do anything to avoid it. Even the term used to describe it — getting skunked — reeks of pity. But what would happen if we decided that fly fishing no longer needed to be so fixated on the target. What if our focus was an alignment of skill, technique and craft into a form of spiritual practice? What is the mushin of the fly angler?

In any practice, one must be disciplined. Dedication to all aspects of the form is paramount, building a commitment to a whole way of being that extends deep into our daily lives. In this way, mushin is found in countless hours at the vise, forged by the thread wraps of a homemade rod. Just as a master archer draws the bow without thinking of the target, the angler creates their practice long before they know when and where a fish will bite. The reward lies in the unfolding of the moment driven by the decision to replace ‘the fly fishing lifestyle’ with a way of life.

The Path Forward

Modern fly fishing is not inherently flawed. Nor is it damned. It’s simply in a state of evolution, shaped by a changing environment and the very tools meant to enhance it. As our attention spans shorten, fly fishing becomes transactional. Social media amplifies this, feeding us a curated, performance-driven version of what it means to be an angler.

The path forward is right in front of us, however uncomfortable it might be to confront.

To usher fly fishing’s into a new era, we must redefine it as a practice, not a sport. Shifting the focus away from the constant pursuit of more and bigger fish allows us to expand the space around the catch. In that open space, new passions for craft can emerge, and new forms of creativity can take root. Playfulness and experimentation will lead to fresh discoveries while discipline will allow us to catch fewer fish with greater joy and deeper meaning.

If we continue to think of angling a sport, it will continue to be something that is inherently competitive. But if we allow ourselves to let go of the need for validation and shift our focus to the practice itself, fly fishing will naturally continue to evolve into something richer and more fulfilling than we’ve ever known.

Today we have the opportunity to own that change. But if we wait too long, the future of fly fishing may be dictated for us, and this cherished thing could become a thing of the past.