We need more blogs!

When January rolls around, it will mark the start of my fifth year writing this blog. During the first two years, I routinely posted twice a week and then upped my game over the last two years by putting up three posts a week of which two were trip reports. It has been a lot of work and your positive feedback, and more recently, the book sales have kept me motivated.  But do you know there are two other great blogs that you should bookmark and take a hard look at?

Mikescatchreport.com is the gold standard for blogs. I wish mine to be as beautiful as Mike's! When you read his postings, not only is the content clear, understandable and well written, but the presentation is absolutely top-notch! Mike is unique in that in addition to fishing in the local Maryland and Virginia area, he has the great joy of spending a significant amount of time in exotic places. If you want to read about bonefishing in Hawaii, monster trout in New Zealand or even steelhead fishing up north, Mike's your guy. In particular, I love his detailed coverage of the Shad fishing in the spring when he ventures out with the other hordes from Fletcher's boathouse. He's an expert on Beaver Creek and other core streams in central Maryland.

Another great, well-written blog is the oddly named Virginia Medical Fly Fishing run by Cameron Hill. No, it's not about dissecting trout -- it's about catching them. The blog is written by a couple of medical students down at the University of Virginia and should be an example to the rest of us regarding work-life balance. Here you have three guys in one of the toughest medical programs in the country, but they still find time to get out and fish. Maybe that's why or how they can survive! Fishing certainly provides a great outlet for stress!  These guys focus on the mountain trout streams as well as the central and western trout rivers to include the Jackson. When the trout season ends, they switch to my passion, smallies! They have great coverage of the Rivanna and the James. In addition to a calm and clear writing style, they have a really cool inset from Google maps with key locations bookmarked for the clicking.

The bottom line on both of these is that they are active. For a site to remain interesting, it cannot get stale. There have been other blogs that I linked to and since disconnected from because there were months without any additional content added. We need more bloggers -- and if you join us, please be prolific (every other week?)! In a later post, I'll share my two secrets on how I can pump out three postings a week while still having a full-time job as a program manager for complex IT programs.  Once you get organized, it's not that hard.

Tell a friend about this article by clicking on this link