The Seine used to be the fishing playground of older, working-class men who whiled away their retirement days at the river. These days, a younger and more diverse generation is disrupting the scene transforming a centuries-old tradition into an underground culture.
LINK (via: The NY Times)
Yep, we’ve got the same over here in Britain.
https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoutbackUK/videos
Jeffas, the Nothern English lad concerned, is super-enthusiastic and really can fish an Urban “Banx” lure (did a lot myself as a kid in the 1960s and ’70s, then had the good fortune to meet France’s original and best in the very early 1980s, Albert Drachkovitch, then turned his technique on Indian mahseer) but…..
…. but what happens, now, I wonder, when the newly Influenced young very quickly find that only a very few of their number can become Influencers themselves? Really cool, to-die-for-and-to-be-seen-with rods and reels and an unlimiteed stock of lures don’t come cheap and have to be paid for unless you’re fortunate enought to have been in at the very start….
Okay, I can see where the tackle makers and sellers are going with this – trying to turn urban lure-fishing into street-shoed parkour or, better still, new skateboard chic – and get numbers back into Angling and into buying, but, I ask myself, what happens when the sponsorships run out…? This happened in flyfishing a while back, but then at least there was an affluent and still, then, interested, potential big $s buying client-pool to take to take up the slack. But with these youngsters, who today, unless they have parents with money, are far less affluent than all the young guys awhile back who wanted to be a Trout Bum, but soon found themselves a seldom actually fishing Fishing Guide, then eventually burned out?
I believe that the always sales-hungry and possibly now increasingly cash-strapped tackle companies and corporations need to give this Influencer Thing a lot more thought, like considering the possibility that short-term Influencer-generated sales gains might actually might (an old British saying, “One / a few Swallows don’t make a summer.” unaccountably springs to my over-sparky mind) actually harm their own and Angling’s long-term future health, that there’s a lot more to long-term Angling than merely shifting the latest must-have, new model, top-end kit to the a new generation who, I believe they’re failing to understand, aren’t like the fish- and- and fishing-crazy generations of old and have little of their money and little future prospect of making it, that “The New Cool Alone Just Ain’t Going’ to Cut It”, not now, not in fishing or what old-style Waltonian Bruvs like me call Angling…..
But hey……..