Then of course there’s the quest for fish, a mysterious act indeed, and to actually catch one is a magical connection to something both exciting and ancient. It’s as though this experience gives one a true connection to our hunter-gatherer past, or so it might seem.
Needless to say, fishing would become a very important part of my life and I was in good company. However today, a small handcrafted boat meandering slowly leading a few trolling lines is un-cool, in a world where bigger, faster and noisier rules the waves.
There are some disturbing trends in general angler participation rates in North American jurisdictions, as well as in other parts of the world. In short, the number of anglers is declining. In BC alone, we have lost almost 20% of resident license purchasers during the past 10 years. At the same time, the numbers of children fishing has also taken a downward trend.
There are many reasons for the declines in angler participation, some of which include lack of easy access to good fishing, busy lifestyles with both parents working, more structured activities for children, complicated fishing regulations, or simply the lack of information on how to and where to go fishing.
Fishery managers in almost every developed nation around the world have been fretting since the early 1990s about the growing number of people walking away from the sport in favour of other pursuits.
In B.C., home to some of the best and most accessible sport fishing on the planet, the province is selling 29 per cent fewer annual freshwater fishing licences than in 1993-94, and federal sales of annual saltwater licences are down 47 per cent during the same period.
Recently, the American Sportfishing Association told a Congressional subcommittee about a similar trend across the U.S., and noted a parallel decline in many traditional outdoor pursuits including camping and visits to parks -- trends also noted here in B.C.
Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C. president Don Peterson said the decline is even greater than license sales suggest.
A recent analysis written for the provincial government pointed to three factors in the decline:
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Immigrants for whom fishing was not a part of their early lives.
•An increasingly urban population without links to the province's vast wilderness.
•Aging boomers taking up other pursuits.
Also noted, kids have other distractions as well, notably video games.
This tourism-focused industry with an annual $1.2-billion value to the provincial economy appears to be at risk. Of course disappearing fish habitat would impact any fishery, but there’s more to the question of “why are their fewer anglers?” and the answer isn’t just within lower fish populations.
"We've lost something in the order of 70,000 adult anglers since the early 1990s, which is disturbing, particularly when you consider the population of the province has increased by almost a million people in that same period," Peterson said.
"Not only are we losing our market share, we're not taking any advantage of the overall growth in the population of the province” he said.
In the southern interior there have been signs of the decline for the past decade, small Mom and Pop fishing lodges are slowly disappearing and at the same rate fishing gear sections at big box retailers are shrinking. But note, the home and garden sections in those same stores are growing.
While the provincial government recognizes the importance of sport fishing to tourism in rural BC, you would be hard pressed to find that marketing presence in a Visitor Information Centre eager to promote city activities and in this valley the wineries.
Cultural Tourism is where it’s at today, and somehow sitting on a vineyard patio sipping a glass of merlot has become the premiere part of authentic Canadian culture, while fly-fishing a quiet stream is not.
So at the end of the day it’s all about us, and what we want, or what we think we want.
The most important clue about the future that I read into this whole thing, is that fact that immigrants who have no childhood experience fishing, have little interest in taking up the past-time, so if our kids today don’t experience fishing, then we can expect this downward spiral to continue.
The past approach to managing recreational fishing has been failing. Peterson said the traditional approach in fisheries management is to issue a set of regulations detailing catch limits and angling restrictions on individual lakes, stock fish in them, and then more or less step back and leave anglers to themselves.
Complicated regulations and licensing procedures have been suspected as barriers to participation, but, again, no one has gone out and asked existing and potential anglers the questions necessary to verify such suspicions.
The sport fishing industry is trying hard to reverse the trend.
Inspired by a wildly successful marketing campaign in England, where licence sales are up more than 40 per cent, B.C. is beginning to reel in new and lapsed anglers.
Annual freshwater licence sales were up six per cent to 190,000 in 2006-2007, compared to a multi-decade low of 177,000 two years earlier.
Future endeavours envisioned within the new approach includes the development of a website where anglers can -- for the first time -- buy fishing licences online, from wherever they have access to a computer instead of scheduling a trip to a sporting goods store.
In BC, we have had only the national angling survey that is conducted every five years to gain information on existing angler activities. We have even less information about potential anglers.
Data in previous surveys has shown that, often, a decision by occasional anglers to go fishing is spur-of-the-moment, and the time consumed in obtaining a licence is a potential deterrent.
Understanding the behaviour of present and future anglers remain key to the success in England, and will prove to be the primary ingredient for success here as well. At present, the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C. is sitting on boxes of hundreds of thousands of receipts from past licence years -- but lacks the financial resources to analyze that data for the benefit of anglers.
"As part of the marketing approach, you need to understand who your customers are and be able to survey them," Peterson said. "That's going to be a key for us going forward from both a fisheries-management and a marketing perspective."
I hope Peterson and his colleagues are successful, if they’re not, there’s something to be lost here for sure if we’re not careful.
Upon reflection, I know for a fact that the solitude of fishing, the connection with something wild, created more environmentalists in this past generation, than a Greenpeace campaign could ever dream of.
Let’s hope the art of sport fishing and other quiet outdoor pursuits can capture the interest of a whole new generation of British Columbians.
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