Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
The Fly Fishing Film Tour screens about ten films chosen each year from worldwide submissions, edited into a roughly two-hour-and-fifteen-minute program shown in one evening. The Canadian rights holders tour it across the country from December through March, and any host town can apply to run a show.
Mariko Izumi hosted six seasons of a fishing travel show on World Fishing Network, grew up in the Canadian fishing family of Bob Izumi, and now co-owns the Canadian distribution rights to the Fly Fishing Film Tour.
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How does the Fly Fishing Film Tour work?
Filmmakers and anglers worldwide submit films each year to the tour's US head office, which selects roughly the top ten. Those films are cut into a program of about two hours and fifteen minutes and shown in a single evening, in a theater or a party-style venue. The films are not released to television or YouTube, so the tour screening is the only place to see the full versions, and the program deliberately mixes cinematography, soundtracks and character-driven storytelling.
How does a town get a Fly Fishing Film Tour screening?
Any town in Canada can host a Fly Fishing Film Tour night by emailing the Canadian office, and several recent cities were added because a local fly fishing group approached them rather than the other way round. The package is turnkey: the tour supplies the films and sponsor giveaways and acts as a guide, while the host chooses the venue and partners and pays for the room. Whatever the host generates from ticket sales, raffles or a charity component stays with the host.
How did she get into the fishing television business?
She grew up on a fishing TV set, since the year she was born was the year her uncle and her father started their own fishing show in the early 1980s, when Canada had none. Her own entry came after university and a PR graduate program, when a fishing network's headquarters opened in Toronto and her father, who has acted as her unofficial agent, pitched her to them. Her first paid work was leading on-stage Q and As with pro anglers at a Toronto sportsmen's show, followed by a five-minute online fishing-facts series, a web job taken specifically to get inside the company full-time, and then a travel show pilot shot in July 2008.
What actually decides where a fishing TV show films?
Location on a sponsored fishing show is set by scheduling and sponsorship money, not by when the fish are there. She describes a fly fishing shoot in New Brunswick booked into what would be the worst two weeks of the year for that river, chosen because it was what worked for all the parties involved, and the crew caught nothing and had to go back and spend more money. Her point for viewers is that episodes where the fishing looked poor usually reflect the business behind the show rather than the crew.
What was hardest about being on camera in the fishing industry?
The hardest parts were not the fishing. Social media hate was new around the time the show started and landed hard at first, coming from people who knew nothing about her, though she says it stopped affecting her over time. The other cost was time away from home: the show ran six seasons over seven years, during which her partner went from boyfriend to fiancé to husband, and long absences plus constant new people made the relationship side of the job difficult.
What does she do besides the film tour?
She runs a travel blog she started right after the show finished, writing about the places she still travels to, including a bass fishing trip in Japan with her father that still generates reader questions about guides. She works with brands, including a fishing knives and tools company and a health-focused lifestyle company based in Austin, Texas. Her partner runs a sturgeon guiding business on the Fraser River out of Hope, British Columbia, where the largest fish are measured and recorded in the water rather than lifted out.
What is her advice for building a career in the fishing industry?
Her starting point is that fishing is a pastime for millions of people in North America but is still not mainstream, so making money in the industry is genuinely hard and nobody should choose it because it looks easy. Her takeaway from the career itself is to stay true to an authentic version of yourself rather than the version an industry says it wants, because that is what makes failures and rankings survivable. Her ambition for the film tour follows the same logic: get non-fly-anglers and high-school-age audiences into the room, on the theory that seeing it is what pulls people outside.
Key takeaways
- Fly Fishing Film Tour films are not released to TV or YouTube, so the touring screening is the only place to see the full versions.
- Hosting a screening is turnkey: the tour supplies films and sponsor swag, the host pays for the venue and keeps ticket and raffle income.
- Canadian tour dates cluster from December through March, which is why the trade show season and the film season overlap.
- Sponsorship and scheduling, not fish timing, often set where a fishing TV show films, which explains episodes with poor fishing.
- Getting inside a company in any role can be a faster route to the job you want than pitching for it from outside.
- On the Fraser River, the biggest sturgeon are measured and their data recorded with the fish in the water rather than lifted onto the boat.
