1. From 1990, the number of news articles about kayak fishing kept increasing, and it peaked in 2007.

2. Since 2007, the number of published news articles about kayak fishing has kept decreasing. In fact, the number of news articles about kayak fishing in 2009 was lower than its level in 2004.

This chart was taken from a screen shot of the Google page above:

Interestingly, the number of websites and blogs related to kayak fishing has visibly gone up in the past decade, as part of the media explosion brought by the Internet. In addition, big and small kayak manufacturers have focused on the kayak fishing market in every way they could, and tried to bring the public’s attention to their products by all means.

So what’s the reason for this decrease in media coverage of kayak fishing in the past two years?

The first explanation that comes to mind is that it could be related to the economic recession, but does it make sense? The recreational fishing boat market has been severely hit, but what kayak manufacturers and other vendors and affiliated professionals have been saying is that now, more then ever, a kayak offers a the cheap way to go fishing, and consequently, they expected sales of fishing kayaks and to go through the roof, and interest in kayak fishing to explode. They even promoted the idea of stand-up kayak fishing from their obviously inadequate kayaks, thinking the public would go for it.

However, we think, as we’ve stated in the past, that many kayak anglers quit practicing kayak fishing after some time, as they find it to be less rewarding than they had initially hoped it would be. Usually, the kayak angler’s expectation is to be able to spend a few hours on the water, having fun catching fish, while the reality in many cases is that doing so results in a sore back, an aching butt, and numb legs – on top of being wet, especially if you fish from a SOT kayak.

In other words, a significant proportion of kayak anglers drops from the sport, and it could be that their numbers are now equal to, or exceed the number of new kayak anglers who enter the sport. Consequently, the public’s level of interest in kayak fishing has begun to decline, and the lower level of media exposure reflects this trend.

At Wavewalk, we’ve experienced a totally different reality, with sales increasing year after year at a faster pace, and 2009 being a boom year. Read more >>

This success has to do with the fact that our W kayaks offer a truly good user experience, less fatigue, no back pain or any other physical pain and discomfort, plus they’re stable enough to offer stand-up kayak fishing in confidence and safety.

Related article: Read more about web search trends for kayak fishing >>

Since there are no official data to analyze, we keep tracking the search activity on Google, through Google Trends. Here is their latest report on USA searches for ‘kayak fishing’: USA Kayak Fishing Report 2004-2009

With kayak fishing continuously being referred to as the fastest growing paddle sport, one can only wonder why such strong growth isn’t reflected in Internet searches on the most popular search engine, although Internet search itself is an activity that’s grown very rapidly in recent years.

The simplest answer we can think of is that kayak fishing has become more institutionalized in recent years with more websites and tournaments dedicated to kayak fishing, and a couple of kayak fishing magazines, but the real increase in the volume of kayak anglers has been more moderate than what fishing kayak vendors and kayak fishing media would like the public to believe.

Like every social phenomenon, kayak fishing has had its period of initial, fast growth, followed by a period of moderate growth, and now possibly a very moderate growth – if any.

It’s likely to assume that the main reason for the decrease in growth rate is the fact that many anglers who try kayak fishing end up quitting this sport because they find kayaks to be inadequate for fishing, obviously because fishing kayaks offer neither sufficient stability nor elementary comfort.

One would have assumed that in times of economic crisis, millions of motorized anglers would flock to kayak fishing as a cheap substitute, but it seems like such shift hasn’t occurred in reality.

As for Wavewalk, we’ve experienced a major growth in sales of fishing kayak models this year, and nearly all our clients have been using traditional sit-in and SOT fishing kayaks before they decided to switch to ours.

We’d like to thank all our clients and supporters, and we’ll keep doing the best we can to provide people with the world’s best kayaks, and support them with the best service we can.

Yoav

Previous blogs on similar subjects:
June
March
February
January
2008

As for our website, another record was broken in July, with 18,638 unique visitors (real, individual people, that is). So far, our website attracted more than 100,000 unique visitors since the beginning of 2009.

Wow!