Hello readers, and welcome to the senior project blog at Emerald Water Anglers.
Our names are Graham, Teagan, and Orlando, and we just concluded a great first week here at the shop. Over the next month, we plan to grow the youth program, emerging anglers, while we are here.
On our first day in, we met with Dave to get a lay of the land for how the business operates and functions, as well as discussing sustainability and the current state of fly fishing in Washington. Over lunch at Husky Deli, we shared our story with Dave, and he told us of his visions of what he hopes we accomplish over the month. We talked about how we first got into fishing as well as our hope to make the most of our great opportunity here. We knew it was important to connect with the local community, so we brainstormed some ideas to get started. After a night dedicated to looking over the shop manual “An Introduction to Fly Fishing,” we came in early the next morning, ready to learn about the many pieces that make up the whole of fly fishing.
While we all had some experience with fly fishing, most of what we learned that day was largely new to all of us, so there was quite a bit to take in. Dave asked us questions that aimed to challenge us, and we had to think critically to come up with solutions. We learned about rods (including categorization), reels, line, fly fishing mechanics, leaders, and where and when to use what. On our next day, we came in to learn how to tie flies with Mitch, an employee at the store. We started with the wooly bugger, maybe the single most versatile fly of the PNW. We then moved on and tried our hands at the stonefly, which was certainly trickier. The whole process required our complete focus and attention to detail, but with the help of Mitch, we soon had a couple of very “buggy” flies!
Now that we had covered another integral aspect of fly fishing, it was time to learn how to actually cast. So on day three, Dave took us through a complete fly-casting lesson. We started with the basics - (how to grip the rod, wrist position, and arm movement) - before eventually working our way up to double hauling. That afternoon, we began to dive into our objective when we created a mission statement and logo that encapsulates the vision for the brand of emerging anglers. After a couple of drafts, we concluded that “Empowering youth to forge a new generation of anglers through engaging education and outdoor experiences, creating curiosity and excitement” would be a mission statement that would faithfully represent what we are trying to do. In summary, our first week consisted of a lot of the basics - we had to familiarize ourselves with fly fishing before tackling the bigger things.
While the week was full of learning and progress, we also had a number of setbacks, which we will try and tackle this upcoming week. Firstly, we found it challenging to create a new logo for the youth program. With the costs that come with traditional online logo creators and graphic designers, we had to create a logo ourselves. We first tried to sketch ideas on paper, but realized that it could be challenging to take our ideas from the paper and generate them online. We found our solution in Adobe Illustrator, where Teagan quickly created an idea for a new logo: an E and an A shaped by a fishing line coming out of a rod. While there is more work to do, we have a good start on this element of the brand. Another way in which we found struggles was with our line casting on Thursday. While we had all cast fly fishing rods at some point with varying levels of skill, we found there was a lot more work to be done to cast effectively and efficiently. We all had habits that we needed to work on, and much of what we thought we knew had to be relearned. We will continue to practice our casting in the future, whether it be on the salt or on the rivers.
While we already had a busy week, we have so much more we wish to accomplish in the coming weeks. Some of this is more of the essential but basic aspects of running a business, including helping customers, taking inventory, and working the front desk. But looking past that, we hope to be able to continue the growth of the youth program and its social media account: emerging_anglers. Our hope is that this growth and attention can lead to something meaningful and promote a younger generation of new anglers to pick up the sport of fly fishing. We hope we can help these young anglers find their own excitement and interest in the sport, something that they can carry with them for life.
We hope you continue to follow us here at Emerald Water Anglers, and we'd love to see you at the shop!
Orlando, Graham, and Teagan
