The sport of kayak fishing and the kayak fishing industry have evolved considerably in the past decade, and this blog will cover both.
The statistics for this sport are unreliable, and possibly even non-existent, but judging by the number of participants in local kayak fishing tournaments in the US, for which the statistics are reliable, and by other sources of quasi reliable data (E.G. Google), it is possible to estimate the total number of people who fish regularly from kayaks (I.E. kayak anglers) as ranging in the lower tens of thousands.
The sport of kayak fishing and the kayak fishing industry have evolved considerably in the past decade, and this blog will cover both.
The statistics for this sport are unreliable, and possibly even non-existent, but judging by the number of participants in local kayak fishing tournaments in the US, for which the statistics are reliable, and by other sources of quasi reliable data (E.G. Google), it is possible to estimate the total number of people who fish regularly from kayaks (I.E. kayak anglers) as ranging in the lower tens of thousands.
This number is still very small in comparison with the overall number of people who take part in recreational fishing, estimated at over forty million in the US alone, and compared with the total number of leisure boats registered in the US, which attains seventeen million – most of them motorboats.
The United States being the biggest market for boats, kayaks, and fishing gear makes such estimate more compatible with reality.
As for the growth rate in participation, judging from Internet activity, as well as numbers of participants in local kayak fishing tournaments, it is possible to say that the exponential growth rate that characterized the first half of this decade has plateaued, or at least come down to a rate of a few percent annually.
The New Jersey store that pioneered this sport, and played an important role in promoting it through its popular online forums, closed a year ago. On the other hand, major distributors of fishing gear and fishing boats now offer fishing kayaks as part of their regular product offering.
As far as media coverage in concerned, two opposite trends can be perceived:
The first is a slow decrease in external coverage, that is the overall attention given to kayak fishing in the general media (TV and newspapers) has been decreasing steadily.
On the other hand, the kayak fishing market itself has come up with a plethora of online publications, from kayak fishing magazines to websites and discussion forums, and blogs. There is still only one hard copy kayak fishing magazine, and it is not clear if its publishers intend to keep printing it, since its number of issues published per year keeps decreasing.
Kayak fishing has become much more popular in the southern, warmer regions of the United States, and its popularity decreases in a direct relation to factors such as average temperature (weather), water temperature, and the number of sunny days, or ‘fishable days’ in the year. Although fishing from shore and from boats is very popular in the Northern regions, kayak fishing isn’t.
This probably explains why sit-on-top (SOT) kayaks are more popular as fishing kayaks than sit-in (SIK) kayaks are. Simply, southern kayak anglers prefer the SOT over the SIK due the its being self-bailing, and they are less concerned about being protected from the elements, I.E. cold water and/or cold wind. As for northern anglers, they don’t seem to embrace the notion that fishing from a small, unstable and exposed boat such as either a SOT or a sit-in kayak is fun.