In a Tailing Loop interview, my guide friend Ian Rutter suggests the fly fishing industry — now heavily engaged in a lot of hand wringing over its shrinking fortunes — is at least partly to blame for its situation:

We all aspire to fish for large fish in exotic locations, but it seems like that’s the bulk of what you see in the fly fishing media. I seem to remember when Montana and Alaska were the ultimate while trout in the Smokies, Pennsylvania and New York were the “common” destinations. Now Montana is a baseline and everything has to be bigger and more extreme. It’s fun for diehard fly fishers to watch those videos and read those articles, but it’s a lousy way to attract new fly fishers.

Every week I talk to folks who are curious about fly fishing but weren’t even aware that you could use a fly rod for bluegills, let alone bass or other very common fish. It’s not unusual for me to hear from people who trout fish, but haven’t cast a fly rod in a year because they don’t live near trout water. I doubt anyone loves trout fishing more than I do, but is there any more perfect a fish for a fly rod than a bluegill? They rise, attack a fly, fight hard for their size, and most importantly, you can find them anywhere. I’m just mystified that the fly fishing industry continues to push more exotic fish and locations to a dwindling number of people when there are plenty of people who would love to get involved in the sport, even if they don’t live near a trout.

If you read any of the popular fly fishing magazines, you might be nodding your head right now.

South America, Russia and Alaska pretty much dominate fly fishing’s print media, and you’d have to wonder how a wannabe fly fisherman would view that particular landscape.

And just to prove Ian’s no poseur, my last trip to Tennessee found us spending a day catching big bluegill (big enough to put a serious bend in the 6wt I was throwing).

I had a ball.

Would I have paid a guide for that trip? I don’t know.

But I do know I would have gone back a dozen times already if I lived there. And I’d take a newbie there first.

Of course, reality pokes its head in the door, and with ad dollars hard to come by at the moment, the magazines and travel agencies and fly shops will continue doing whatever it takes to hold onto their existing base.

Still, the rapid growth in the number of anglers fishing for non-salmonid species seems real and ongoing, and it’s one area where the Internet is dramatically ahead of fly fishing’s print media.

I’m never quite sure if fly fishing for carp or drum or whatever is a counter-culture rebellion against the sport’s traditions or simply fly fishermen giving high gas prices the middle finger (probably a combination of the two), but I don’t care; I like it.

In an era when $800 fly rods and $4000 destination trips consume the magazines, the real growth in the sport will probably remain a grassroots thing, and as Ian noted (at least in his neck of the woods), you don’t get any more grassroots than bluegill.

It’s unlikely we’ll see too many “Bluegill specialists” popping up in the media — and visiting fly fishermen will probably still glaze over when I mention the smallies at the local lake as a diversion — but a healthy dose of sunfish (and carp, and drum, and smallmouth bass) could be one prescription for an ailing industry.

In the shooting world, people don’t start shooting long-range precision matches; they hammer away at cans with fun, affordable .22 rifles.

The fly fishing world seems to have forgotten that.

(You can read Ian’s whole interview at the Tailing Loop.)

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