Denver Was the Place

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Fly Fishing Retailer Show
Denver, 2008

Place

It’s the fly-fishing industry’s shining moment, our grand ball of business; also our Cannes Film Festival, sort of, for what’s new. Almost every major brand does a booth here—some build colonies—to pitch products directly to dealers and distributors, domestic and foreign. It’s also the place where new companies come to make good.

Large and small, all hope you will see their products in shops this year. And, seeing, buy.

Ted Leeson and Daryl Martin will talk up FR&R’s “New Gear.” Here, in a three-part series—Place, People, Causes—comes highly personal takes on an event that has little to do with your day of solitude on a stream, adventures on salt flat, drift down a river—unless…

You use a rod and reel. Wear waders, boots, hats, coats, gloves, sunglasses, vest or post-vest engineered soft-goods-chest thing; cast lines, leaders and tippets, flies, indicators, weight; float in tubes or on pontoons…

Unless you learn about tying and tactics from books, or find inspiration between soft or hardbound covers—include DVDs, now—or wander the Internet for former or latter or something else entirely…

You get the idea. Unless it’s home made, custom, bamboo, off-off-brand, ancient or seriously off-beat…whatever tool you fish with likely showed up here, well before you got it.

So…promotion’s most of it, for exhibitors; research, for buyers. But everybody also assesses competition, sniffs for trends, exchanges information, hears and spreads rumors. The best story of this year has legs, relayed by AFFTA (the American Fly-Fishing Trade Association, our sport’s voice of the trade) itself at the first day breakfast: that The River Why? will take to film (presuming some legal issues get satisfied, some say). Optimists think it will cast fly-fishing into the limelight again—chartreuse to you—and even the most dour would like to see a Why flick lead to revival, however modest, after a year when, per one innovative wholesaler, “Losing seven per cent felt like breaking even, given all that was going on.”

Could happen. There was a surprisingly upbeat feel on the show floor this year, among most with whom I spoke, a “cautious optimism” oiling nervous water. This was also true after a drink or two, which doesn’t always improve perspective. That spirit seemed due, in part, because not too many people presumed to know exactly what our future looks like. Said Ed Engle, guide, author and sage, “I’ve seen more changes in fly-fishing in the last couple of years than I can remember.”

But wait. Let’s look at this from other eyes.

Yours, I mean. If I might guess. 
 

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