Salmon Fishing Report & Water Gremlin Contest Reminder

I just posted a short report and photos in the forums about the salmon fishing trip I went on yesterday. Dave landed three solid fish, and there were several other guys that landed some absolutely massive ones. I still haven’t managed to land anything on my float setup yet, but I’m getting better and closer. I also dropped my reel in the water and had to fish it out by stripping all the line and backing which was a huge headache. I may head out again in the morning to the Credit River, hopefully I’ll have better luck.

Don’t forget about our new contest where you and a friend could win some fantastic gear from Water Gremlin! Here is a simple breakdown of the contest details.

1. Register for our Forums
2. Post in our Member Introductions Forum

Refer a friend to Fishing Fury Forums by having them and you could win! Winners are chosen every month for the rest of the year, with the year-end winners receiving a full weight set from Water Gremlin!

Continue Reading the Salmon Fishing Report

Important Site & Network Updates!

Hey everybody! It’s not to often that we do site updates, but generally when we do it’s a pretty big update which is why we like to make these posts, the only real difference here is that none of these updates have happened yet. Over the past few months, even years in some cases, we’ve been testing out different ways to promote and share our content with the world. The most recent highlight of that struggle was our seeing our work in printed glory in the 2010 edition of Fins + Skins magazine.

Along the way we learned a lot of lessons, we stretched out to create new projects like Rockstar Lures, Fishing Fury Forums, and LegendaryFishermen. In all our successes and failures there comes a time to take all you’ve learned and focus it like a laser beam into what works best, unfortunately somethings get blasted into oblivion during the process. This post is exactly that, we’re going to be focusing harder on what’s working for us, and blasting away some of the stuff that isn’t.

FeedBurner

We will be dropping feedburner support! This means that if you subscribe to our rss feed you’ll want to make sure that you change the subscription URL back to fishingfury.com (RSS, RSS 2, RDF, ATOM), because the feedburner feed will eventually stop updating. We apologize for this, but for all that feedburner gave us, we simply lost a lot of the specialized tracking I setup in analytics, and most of the so-called ranking sites out there fail to update their statistics from the sites that provide the data they rank you on. Rubbish!

The Official Fishing Fury Gallery

Believe it or not, the official gallery is moving again!* It’s even hard for me to believe, honest. The official gallery will coming back home to FishingFury.com (http://www.fishingfury.com/gallery/) thanks to the wordpress 3.0 custom post types, and a few weeks of sleepless nights for me to write all the hooks and templates. We moved the gallery back here to wordpress for several reasons, easy comment moderation, avatars, super-fast gallery creation and editing, and better SEO. The only thing we’re losing is the view counts for the photos, instead we’ve planed to replace this with a simple favorite/like style counter, and from there we can gather the data to rank photos by popularity. Well, what are you waiting for go check out the new home of the Official Fishing Fury Gallery.

* Links to and from the old gallery will be redirected in the next week or two and the domain will likely be repurposed in to some new venture down the road.

Legendary Fishermen

We will be closing Legendary Fishermen in the near* future, so if you have a blog there and want a backup that you could say import into wordpress.com, just email us and we’ll get it for you. We’re very sorry to everyone that signed up and participated, we’ve got your emails written down and will have some cool prizes for you to show our appreciation. Legendary Fishermen was a great idea to create, or rather start, a site for fishermen to create their own blogs, communities, etc. The site and it’s content is actually created by the people on it rather than by say, Clive of myself. Unfortunately, I don’t think it quite worked out. I honestly feel like buddypress just wasn’t as quick and easy for people to pick up. The blogs got quite a bit of use, but all the community aspects were bare. It would take a lot of time for me to get the design perfect, and still requires a lot of time to maintain, time that could be better spent writing.

* There is no planned date, likely not for months and after everyone has their data.

New Sponsors

Over the next month or two we will be adding a number of new sponsors and announcing some new ventures and partnerships. I don’t want to get into too much detail yet but the upcoming announcement will explain everything and I hope that everyone will be supportive and as excited as Clive and I are.

New Forums

Sometime before or just after the new year we will be migrating our forum away from SMF and into VBulletin. The new forum software is much more robust and we’ve even got a number of great features and rewards lined up for our most active and prominent members, and even a very special surprise for those of you that participated in the legendaryfishermen.com experiment.

Fins + Skins Magazine

Clive and I are working towards getting a number of copies of the Fins + Skins magazine that we will most likely be using as prizes for upcoming contests and giveaways. So stay tuned for your chance to win a copy!

Your feedback is appreciated

We’d love to hear from you about ways that we can improve our site, as well as your enjoyment and interaction, so if you have any ideas or suggestions please feel free to let us know in the comments below.

Thank you all very much and we look forward to beginning our 7th year of bringing you the most exciting fishing content the world has to offer.

Swivel Fail

I posted this image in the forums but I don’t think anyone took a close look at it. This photo was taken by a fellow named Ed that I met while fishing on Sunday.

This 25″ or so pike hit really hard and some how was able to mangle the snap swivel on the end of my leader. I did my best to tire this guy out and keep my line tight so that he wouldn’t get away. Right up until I got him almost on shore and grabbed him he flipped back into the water and swam away with a fresh piece of Mepps bling still in his mouth.

It was a horrible start to a beautiful day. Later we saw a couple smaller pike following our baits all the way up to the shoreline, but no other pike were caught. I’ve also updated the Toronto Islands 2009 photo gallery to include some new photos!

Don’t forget about the latest FLW Trivia Contest!

Sunbathing Northern Pike in Cobourg Harbour

Last week Chad Miller posted this amazing photo in the photography section of our community forums of a Northern Pike hanging out in the clear water shallows of the Cobourg Marina. The photo was so awesome that I asked him to send me the photo so that I could post it here. I’ve included a cropped close-up of the pike as well.

Continue reading for the close-up!

Continue reading “Sunbathing Northern Pike in Cobourg Harbour”…

Spring Is Here, Or Is It?

Well the first day of spring has come and gone. You’d never guess it though if you lived on the east coast of Canada as I do. We had several inches of snow last night and it feel more like January! Fortunately, tomorrow is April 1st, which means fishing season is open! I’ll be heading out for some trout during my lunch break, and if all goes well you’ll see some photos tomorrow. In the unlikely event that I get skunked, you can always check out our forums for other fishing reports around the globe…

Here are a couple photos from the latest spring fishing reports!

Mark and his son with some solid UK carp!

Bill with a nice brown trout and freshwater drum from Lake Ontario, Canada.

Fishing Fury Opens Community Forums For The Furious

We’ve received emails from our fans suggesting that they would like to see a community forum setup for all those fishing maniacs out there. Well, it’s about time you got what you wished for, and no Christmas didn’t come early this year!

Go check out the new Fishing Fury Community Forums!

The board is a fresh install of phpBB and will certainly grow and change over time. However there is no reason why you cant start using it now and let us know how we can make it even better.

I look forward to sharing some great stories and photos with all of you in the near future.

Keep the Fury alive!