The Birth of an online fishing resource
From the Publisher: Our friend Jon's next book is about fishing of a different kind, but for now the author of Kayak Fishing is a welcome addition to the incredible talent we seem to be attracting. This article from Shein is about the birth of the nation's leading online kayak fishing resource. And it ain't TheOnlineFisherman.com. But if we're going to tell you about resources, we can't hide the best you might find if we weren't here to show you. From another aspect, we're a general fishing magazine, and as hot a subject as yakking is right now, it's not the end-all of fishing. To bring you the best there is, we thought you would find how KayakFishingMagazine.net came to exist.
The passion that Publisher Joey Cambria and seasoned writer and editor Jon Shein bring to their online kayak fishing magazine allows them to focus on kayak fishing in a way that no general fishing site can. So if you're thinking about nothing BUT kayak fishing, you'll get hooked first time you go there. Then again, there's room for more than one "favorite fishing site". There better be, or we're dead before we get out of the box. And we aren't.
Jon -- one of the people responsible for the magazine - working with publisher Joey Cambria, can be found on the forums, and works closely with us to ensure our kayak fishing content is up-to-date and reaches beyond the waters of West Central Florida. Interestingly enough, there are at least two other people working with us have fished with Jon here in Florida.
It’s often interesting how things come to be. KayakFishingMagazine.net (KFM) sort of began over a decade ago even though it didn’t officially come into existence until mid 2007. Joe Cambria, the founder, was posting about his kayak fishing exploits on a NY website and I was doing the same on a couple of similar sites in New Jersey.
Shein wrote Kayak Fishing; the first major contribution to the library of kayak fishers the world over. Every major reviewer has given the book rave reviews, and its with little wonder it's considered a must-read for newbies and experienced kayak fishers.
I usually fished alone and my brother and friends wanted to join me. I decided to get a second kayak to take others along and I searched for a used one. That’s how I met Joey, he had the same model as me up for sale. We hit it off and started fishing together. I recognized the potential of fishing from kayaks but it wasn’t getting any support from the kayak industry. I tried to get kayak shops to embrace kayak fishing. They didn’t understand it and couldn’t see it being popular. I knew differently so I started a business catering to fishermen who wanted to fish from kayaks. I knew by selling a bunch of gear the industry would follow the Benjamins.
KayakFishingMagazine.net has risen to the top of the Google Search engines if you do a search for Kayak Fishing. Publisher Joey Cambria and author Shein bring a quality of content to the world of kayak fishing that no other sites -- even The Online Fisherman -- could produce by themselves. You'll find Shein here on a regular basis; he's like any author, and constantly in search of new content. That means you'll find him as Section editor on our Kayak Fishing section, and even on the forums. Pretty soon you might find him at a launch near you.
I invited Joey to join me and the business we created changed the sport. We had forums and a website and I wrote several dozen articles for the site. We catered to kayak fishermen and ignored paddling in general. We were very successful but neither of us really ever wanted to sell kayaks and gear. We wanted to give the sport exposure and our sales got the attention of the kayak and fishing community. Our mission was accomplished so we sold the business and went back to promoting the sport.
Joey officially launched KayakFishingMagazine.net in mid 2007 and I got serious about the book I had started in 2003. Even though our old business had lots of articles, the focus of the business was to sell gear, whereas KFM is all about dispensing information. I contributed articles regularly and then came on board as editor. So Joey and I kind of came full circle. We started off by sharing our fishing adventures on forums and in website articles and now we’re doing so on the most comprehensive site about the sport. What’s great about what we do now is we can provide a tremendous amount of information. There’s considerably more content on KFM then everything that existed about the sport on the Internet when we got started. As technology continues to evolve we constantly add more tools to share the sport.
We hope that you'll be reading about Jon fishing with Jason Stock and Derick Bergos -- both contributing guides to the site. We don't believe in coincidences, but if we did, there would be more here than the most avid non-believer-in-something could accept as 'just happening'.
