Great expectations
Scott MacGregor
Special to Sun Media
My son Dougie doesn’t know that kayak fishing is a fringe sport hardly on the sonar of Berkley or Rapala. He doesn¹t know that most fishermen stand up in boats that do 30-plus miles an hour. Dougie has never seen a red and silver-flaked metallic paint bass boat. At four years old, all he knows about bass fishing is drifting worms past rocky shoals in a kayak.
Like Dougie, kayak fishing is just beyond infancy. This is an early stage of development where growth is irregular and it occurs in spurts in different areas. A stage when different parts of the body grow at different rates.
Enthusiasts are like parents arguing about what is best for our little sport and wonder what it will be when it grows up.
We ask ourselves questions like: What is kayak fishing? Should canoes be considered part of this trend? (They’re allowed in kayak fishing tournaments.) What about inflatable rafts and float tubes? What if it has oars, flippers or a trolling motor?
A kayak by definition is, ‘A canoe of a type used originally by the Eskimo, made of a light frame with a watertight covering having a small opening in the top to sit in.’
This traditional definition pretty much eliminates every fishing kayak on the market today. So we need to cast the net a little wider.
As the publisher of paddling magazines my layman definition of kayaking is less anthropological and more posterior. I figure if you’re sitting on your butt and moving across water using a stick with two blades, then you’re kayaking. And this is what you’ll find when you wander into your local paddling shop.
Where my definition breaks down is with innovative companies who offer foot-operated propulsion systems. While traditional kayakers shudder at the thought, anglers don’t seem to give a rat’s ass (nor I bet would the Eskimos who would have loved the ability to chase seals, harpoons in both hands).
In the last five years we’ve seen marvelous innovations in fishing kayaks, but they still, for the most part, look like kayaks. This is because the initial growth was off-shore in four main areas (California, Texas, Florida and New England) where kayaks work really well.
Our office is in God’s country, rugged Canadian Shield blessed with deep inland lakes, rivers and scruffy lumberjacks. This is largemouth, walleye and muskie territory. It is a land opened by the voyageurs, and a land rich in canoeing heritage.
For three years my fully rigged sit-on-top kayak has hung out the back of my pickup. Never have I met a guy in a plaid flannel shirt who hasn’t asked, “Why wouldn’t you just canoe?” And then, “Where does the trolling motor go?” As more freshwater fishermen take to kayak fishing the definition of a fishing kayak will become even more murky. They are likely to become more like canoes and less like surfing longboards where the whole idea came from years ago.
Maybe in 10 years when the sport has matured and is mainstream Dougie will look back laughing at this photograph of he and I on my sit-on-top kayak, “So that’s why you called it kayak fishing.” No matter what kayak fishing becomes I just hope we’ll be fishing together, metallic paint job or not.
Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Kayak Angler magazine, as well as Rapid, Adventure Kayak and Canoeroots magazines. You can reach him and learn more about kayak fishing at www.kayakanglermag.com.
Fishing full circle
I started fishing like many kids do, keenly watching a bobber, hoping my worm looked tasty to the granddaddy of all bass. Fishing was spending time with my dad, early mornings, a leaky 12-foot aluminum boat and my own Old Pal two-tray tackle box. I whispered over the edge, “Here fishy, fishy, fishy”. As I got bigger so did my dad’s boats. He moved up to downriggers and bigger lakes. Meanwhile my interests remained on smaller lakes and rivers and my boats went the other way, getting smaller and smaller.
For almost 10 years now I’ve been publishing Rapid, North America¹s first whitewater canoeing and kayaking magazine, adding two other paddling magazines along the way (Adventure Kayak and Canoeroots & Family Camping) as my interests stretched into sea kayaking and my focus shifted from running waterfalls to my wife and two children.
Two years ago, when kayak fishing began to really blip on the sonar, I wrote a feature story in Adventure Kayak magazine about a three-day kayak fishing adventure down a class III whitewater river inaccessible by motorboat ‹ fishing for muskie, in November.
Everyone loved the story. Good kayak friends who’d never mentioned fishing before came out of their gear closets with their own old Pal tackle boxes, dusty bamboo rods and reels spewing nests of 20-year-old line. Real fishermen, guys like my dad, also wanted to go kayak fishing for monster muskie. For me, it was the coming together of two of my life’s greatest passions.
Kayak fishing is now growing faster than a fish story after a couple of Coors. The sport is already huge in the saltwater of California, Texas, Florida and New England, and now spawning in freshwater lakes and rivers across Canada.
Kayak fishing is inexpensive, and quiet, and easy. You can get on the water very quickly and fish waters you just can’t from a motorboat or shore. Kayak fishing allows you access to unfished wilderness and immediate on-water access to urban waterfronts in major cities across the country. It combines two of the greatest outdoor sports imaginable. And best of all, it’s a blast to catch big fish from small boats.
Last summer, I started kayak fishing with my then three-year-old son. He started fishing just as I started: with a worm and a bobber. And I have no doubt that the granddaddy of all bass heard us whispering from our quiet kayak, “Here fishy, fishy, fishy.”
By the Number: Growth Signs
Number of fishing rod models Lamiglas and American Rodsmiths make specifically for kayaking: 18
Number of pages that come up when you Google ‘kayak fishing’: 10,400,000
Number of Native Kayaks-endorsed fishing guides: 18
Estimated percent of annual increase in fishing-specific kayak sales: 400
Weight of the largest thresher shark caught from a kayak: 256 pounds
Number of members registered on the Kayakanglermag.com website: 1,636
Number of participants in the largest kayak fishing tournament the 2009
Jacksonville Kayak Fishing Classic in Jacksonville Florida: 430
Number of daily entries on kayakfishing.com forums: 2,200
Number of paddle strokes from where I launch my kayak to the best smallmouth hotspot in my neighbourhood: 55
Number of angler-specific kayak models in Kayak Angler Magazine 2009 Buyer’s Guide: 130
