Har a great day hosting a car ing clinic.

I'm president of the local fly club. We have been around for 40 years but COVID hit us hard. When I took over as president in the fall I said we had stopped the bleeding and now we were on rebuilding, as the previous executive did a great job of doing just that. We have a firm financial footing with about 8 years of operating budget in GIC's. Basically everything has been done right up till now, and hats off to them.

So we got a spot at a home and Garden Show same as last year but followed up with a casting and tying clinic two weeks after. We had 90 people enter to win a free membership at the show. And today people were at the mall at start time. We had three or four practice rods in use with people waiting. We had people tying and others getting more info. CBC and Global tv showed up for on site interviews. This week we had local cable and then province wide CTV morning live on Thursday in lead up with three 2 minute spots. We implemented yapla for membership sign up and management. We also went on an social media blitz posting the event into local fishing groups.

So in one day we doubled our membership from 25 to 50 and recovered all the money invested to this recruitment drive. We had healthy amount of individuals, novice and veteran, and a lot of couples. We may finally be approaching the 30% women average for fly fishing.

The club did the work and we got the results. Now just to get through the hard part, growing pains. Balancing rookies and veterans, instructors and learners.

Basically you can grow the sport by showing it, being enthusiastic, approachable, and I can not stress this enough being there for everyone. We redid our constitutional basis and added open to all, and take that seriously. No hate, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other ism or phobia is tolerated.