A New Year

I should have been out fishing today, but honestly... I chose to sleep in and just take it easy. It is after all just the first day of a new promising year, There will be plenty time to fish, won't there?

I haven't fished much this year. The internal reports page that I keep together with my close fishing friends tell me that I have been fishing 41 days, which is more than decent, but still less than half of the 87 days of 2007, not to mention the 94 days of 2006.

41 days is close to once a week, but still feels like a meager number when I look back. There have been different reasons for the smaller number of days, which I won't cover here, but the fact is that I have simply been fishing half as much as usual. Another fact that makes 2008 feel a little skinny when it comes to fishing might be the fact that my result has been about 20 fish, while the previous years tolled more than 160 fish each year. Catching sure makes a difference, doesn't it?

The slow pace in fishing has also rubbed off on GFF, which has been particularly slow this past year. It's only the latest month or so that publishing has gained some speed, and we alreay have articles for January in the pipeline, so this rhythm will hopefully continue in 2009. If you want to see how we have published until now, check out the Global FlyFisher heartbeat here.

Together with my good friend Ken Bonde Larsen we have started documenting fly patterns step-by-step, and these new articles have been so popular that we expect to continue producing one every second week or so. We have done some salmon flies, a lot of Danish sea trout flies, and will continue with some Danish stream flies and whatever comes to mind. Suggestions are welcome.

And Steve has surfaced! He has been weighed down by work, family and school (getting an MBA), and has barely published a thing lately, but now he is on and will start doing more things in his name.

So expect 2009 to become a good and productive GFF-year. We're getting our act together, and piling new stuff on the GFF stack.

If you have anything that you want to share - patterns, stories, pictures, great gear you used, DIY-tips or whatnot - just let us know. We have lots of space and close to unlimited bandwidth, so pile it on. You can read more about contributing here.