Fishin’ Show: Part 1

We had a great time at the Great Southern Fishing Show this weekend and for the next few days we’ll be bringing you some of the short interviews we did with a few of the vendors. Some clips we unfortunately can’t use due to sound issues. I knew there would be background noise, but what I didn’t anticipate was there being folks manning booths that just wouldn’t speak loud enough for the mic to pick them up. So you hear me asking questions and then you get to lip-read the answers! For those videos, we’ll just work up a short post about what was said, because the folks were so nice to talk to us I don’t want their products to go MIA here on OJDC just because we didn’t have an external mic.

In the name of full disclosure (and because I think it’s kinda funny, too) I’ll tell you that we did get a few “you’re with who?” questions, and we did have a few people agree to our interview, only to turn around 30 seconds later and back out. A couple of vendors asked us to “come back tomorrow” when so-n-so was there. It kinda stung a little, even though we went into this knowing that not everyone would want to talk to us. We knew going into it that OJDC doesn’t have a huge following here in our home state because almost no one here fly fishes.  ;)

This first video is a quick tour of the show. As you can see, it was about the size you’d expect it to be from almost any show (except maybe SHOT) over the last 5 years or so. It’s nothing like the fly fishing shows we had here 10 years ago, but that’s this economy for ya.

I was really disappointed in two things: A. That there weren’t any rods and reels other than fly fishing gear – no Shimano, Diawa, All-Star, Quantum, etc. No plastic baits, no topwater plugs…folks, they called it a “fishing show” but all the gear was definitely Fly Fishing. ~and B. That there weren’t more big names there. Ross, St. Croix, Redington, Winston, Little River Outfitters(probably the most popular fly shop in the South East), Galvan, Thomas & Thomas, etc. – none of these were there.

Several local fly shops provided some of these brands and they must have been having some good sale prices because they were always wrapped up. We didn’t even try to talk to anyone from these booths because of the crowds around them. We’re not sure if the crowds were a good thing or not, since it could just mean that lots of fly fishing consumers were just waiting for this show to get a deal on stuff. I don’t quite think it was a sign that fly fishing sales will be booming anytime soon, unfortunately.

Still, it was a good time and definitely worth going to next year. In fact, we’ve already received an invitation to come back!

Next time, we’ll bring an external mic though………. or maybe even rent a booth ourselves?

 

Music for this video: “Of The Sky” by Gorowski

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