Featured Photo: Streamer Eater on the Clinch

Featured Photo: Streamer Eater on the Clinch

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Fly Tying Google Searches Are Linked To Cabin Fever

Fly tying seems to be peaking in interest right now, and I have good solid data to back me up on that. While perusing the Internet late this evening, I stumbled onto this interesting page called Google Trends that allows you to see what people have been searching for.

Intrigued, I started checking out trends on some fly fishing related topics. One of the more troubling results was that, as a whole, searches on the topic of fly fishing have been declining for almost 10 years. That likely signals a larger decline in people interested in fly fishing which is bad news for the industry.

After getting a couple of obvious searches out of the way, I decided to type "fly tying" into the search box and see what happened. The graph looked suspicious and sure enough, upon investigation I confirmed that each peak in search activity corresponded neatly to the January/February time frame.


Notice that we are recently headed for our seasonal peak in fly tying interest. If this graph does anything, it makes me realize that I'm not the only one stuck at home with cabin fever. For the past 2 weeks I keep telling myself that I'll go fishing sometime soon. Every day I seem to find an excuse to avoid it.

I thought that the weather was going to finally break this week. Originally it looked like highs would be well into the mid and upper 40s which would allow for some decent fishing over in the Smokies. Unfortunately the reality turned out to be a little colder, enough so that we had a coating of ice on everything outside this morning. Freezing fog or drizzle or something like that according to the weather people.

So, instead of fishing, I'm sitting at home and tying flies. Just the fact that I had the time on my hands to research this topic tells me that I need to get out on the water and soon. Next week...

6 comments:

  1. That's interesting. Not too surprising but interesting. I haven't hit the vise in over a year and haven't gotten bit by the bug yet. Oh well, I've still got Feb. and March.

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    1. Howard, better get tying. The worst thing is to go fishing and realize you don't have enough of the hot pattern...

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  2. David
    Interesting link, that I would assume retailers use a lot to track current buying trends. I would guess that the fly fishing decline could be contributed to a particular region in the U.S. I will admit that yes it has decreased in the past ten years but I would be curious to know if that was the case out west especially along the Canadian border. I haven’t seen anyone fly fishing on Smith Lake ever; I guess that is why I get those alien looks when someone sees me casting a popper or dry fly on the Lake. Thanks for sharing the link.

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    1. Bill, I was wondering the same thing. I wonder if any of the decline has to do with Google's market share on search engines as well. To me the streams seem about as crowded as ever but of course who knows for sure. If there really is a decline that is concerning...

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  3. That makes sense. The decrease since 2005 is pretty sad though.

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    1. I agree. We need to find ways to get more people, especially young people, into fly fishing.

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