Kayak fishing promised a cheaper, hassle free, low maintenance, lightweight, car top form of fishing craft, and a direct, sporty experience. However, today, out of tens of millions of Americans who fish from boats, merely one in every thousand fishes from a kayak, and this is after a decade of promises that ‘kayak fishing is the fastest growing outdoors sport’, etc.  The bulk of US anglers have followed neither the kayak fishing pioneers nor the fishing kayak manufacturers’ hype, and since growth in kayak fishing participation is no longer as fast as it had been several years ago, it is safe to say that the US kayak fishing market has matured. This is partly a result of decreasing enthusiasm from new participants, as well as a high dropout rate that has been typical to this sport since its early beginnings.

Yes, but…

But kayak fishing feels extremely uncomfortable only if you’re fishing from the old fashion, sit-on-top (SOT) kayaks and sit-in kayaks. In contrast, when you fish from a W kayak, you experience a level of comfort that’s equivalent to that of fishing from a regular size boat, and some W fans would argue that you feel even better.

When stability is concerned, the level of stability an angler experiences while fishing from a W500 kayak is on par with what they’d feel fishing in a regular size fishing boat, in the sense that they are not required to constantly address the issue of balancing, and they can fish standing up with ease, comfort and confidence that are outside the world of fishing kayaks.

The W500 is the only kayak offering storage space that’s dry and accessible any time, and as much as any kayak angler may need, even if their fishing trip includes camping, and therefore carrying on board numerous and bulky items that so far only canoes and regular size boats could carry.

The future

This is to say that kayak fishing has a future, and a bright one, but not as the extreme sport it’s been for most kayak anglers so far. The future of kayak fishing as a broad base sport and leisure activity depends on the participation of regular people, who care about their personal comfort, and demand a performance level in stability and storage that is not sub-minimal.  In other words, the future of kayak fishing is W 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.