Dear Feathers and Fluoro blog reader,

Your interest in our posts/publications has taken us further than expected – over two million views in less than two years (since we’ve upgraded the site in Nov 2014 – this excludes the hits on the original site that Fred Davis and Peter Coetzee started). Besides celebrating this with a glass of Champagne, we thought that it would be good to get in touch with you about it. The blog is meant to be a South African (and now even a global) hub for fly fisherman to catch up on our stories, history and latest trends.

Feathers and Fluoro, the concept: Feathers and Fluoro is not a magazine; it is a simple blog roll of publications that we (Fred Davis, Peter Coetzee, Leonard Flemming, Conrad and Herman Botes, Andre van Wyk and now also Jazz Kuschke) and our friends write or repost as a matter of fly fishing interest, with the odd lure feature in-between.

Our aim: To develop fly fishing and enrich the fly fishing community with our travels and guiding experience, including flies and techniques that we (and like-minded fly fisherman) develop and any other interesting odds and ends that will make readers look forward to the weekend’s fishing. This is filled in with saltwater artificial lure features describing fishing trips, tips and techniques. All the literature and information is stored and can hopefully be used as an electronic database in the future.

Behind the scenes: We are ordinary fisherman that enjoy casting flies (and some of us – like Andre and Fred – also enjoy fishing lures); we have partners, families and work that keep us out of fishing trouble (mostly), which unfortunately also means that we cannot write/post things 24/7 on Feathers and Fluoro. Pete is an entrepreneur who’s recently started his own successful networking company in rural areas, Fred is a globe-trotting English teacher, Len is a microbiologist that runs his own diagnostic laboratory, Conna is a full-time artist, Dre runs his own production company and Jazz is a freelance writer and journalist. Besides doing all those things we have to do to make a living in modern society, we fish. It is more a case of earning money to go fishing than anything else. Besides that, we love sharing our experiences and knowledge on Feathers and Fluoro.

What we endorse: The conservation of natural resources to protect fishing for future generations, progression in fishing and catch and release fishing in especially the fly fishing and lure fishing disciplines.

What we don’t support: Irresponsible killing of fish and exploitation of sensitive fisheries for commercial use.

What we’ve achieved: Besides achieving much personal growth in fishing knowledge and skill since the start of the blog, the blog’s received views from 203 WordPress-listed countries (Fig. 1); most of our visitors are from South Africa and the United States of America (Fig. 2); the blog has an average current view-count of 96 006 per month since we’ve upgraded the site on 10 Nov 2014, and received up to over 150 000 views per month at the best of times (Fig. 3). Wow! Special thanks to all our readers, we really feel honoured.

Where are we going with the blog? We don’t know. That is also the main reason for this post since it’s become more of a full time hobby that we’ve grown organically and would like to continue ‘running’ till we stop fishing one day – which likely means the unfortunate death of the Feathers and Fluoro blog members…

What we request: Your input! At the moment we simply post things without giving the line-up much thought…So, we would like to quiz our readers about the kind of material they’d like to see more of, and those things they feel are irrelevant or see no need for us to publish? Any comments or feedback would be greatly appreciated – looking forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,

The Feathers and Fluoro team.

(If you’d prefer to send us a personal message, please email: feathersandfluoro@gmail.com)