Crazy to think how fast time flies. Feels like it was yesterday I was kicking around the idea of having a place to continue writing and publishing my photography. Here we are now, ten years later, and still kicking.
Over this past holiday weekend, Tippets and Tales ventured in to its second decade. When aTightLoop broke up, and Stuart and I went our own direction, we intended to keep going, using this blog as the vehicle. Very quickly I realized it wasn’t going to be that easy. Trying to convince someone else to write something, is very challenging and it turned out, we’d rather drink a couple of beers together, and chat, than discuss business and topics we could use as motivation for our writing. Early on, my focus was on all things fly fishing, and then slowly worked in some of aspects of my career and day job. But all in all I feel I struggled, and the posts prove it, to keep up the pace. And before you know it, any form of consistency was gone.
When we had our first child, the little bit of time I had to chase trout, disappeared. Motivation wained, and blog posts dropped. Whole weekend sized windows of opportunity, were replaced with hour sized windows. Day trips to wet wade in late summer chasing trout on foam hoppers, morphed in to weekends at home with the family chasing my princess. I still found time to go fishing and get out with the crew, but often found myself feeling the pull of the homestead, preferring to stay home with my ladies and my pup, than chasing the tug.
After my son was born, and my “me” time continued to whittle away, I found myself falling back in love with golf, romanticizing the old days when I lived out at the club and played 150+ rounds a year. As I fell back to golf, a desire to bring my camera out more often, with the intent of getting back in to shooting golf courses. You see, way back when I was playing all that golf, I was often carrying my old Canon 20D, shooting the early 2000’s version of Medinah Course 1 and Course 3. I loved those days, and thought there was now an added benefit of the variety of public courses I normally play. To maximize time, I was normally first on or last off, so not only did I get to see a lot of courses with tons of photo opportunities, but also had the benefit of the best light of the days. The idea of officially combining fly fishing and golf on the blog seemed to be a no brainer. Before I knew it, I was adding BB and F Co. golf ferrules in to my trout rod builds, and bringing a 3 weight to the course to chase gills.
As I’ve fallen in to more hobbies, what this site has to offer has also grown. With my woodworking, what began as making a bunch of stuff for myself and friends, became a bit of a side hustle. Being able to continue to develop a storefront for displays, tools, markers and more, has been a great new adventure, and really helped get the creative juices flowing again. I’m truly excited to continue growing the shop, and expanding the brand.
Thanks to all of you that have been a part of the journey and who helped keep me going early. Thanks to Stuart for pushing me/us to do this, and for those of you that randomly come to the site on the regular. I can't believe it, but still have some of the same RSS subscribers from the beginning!
I can’t make any promises that I’ll be doubling down on posts, but have been working on some stuff in the background, and have some good things on the horizon I believe. Working to have more things in the store soon, and a bit more content about all the different things I get my hands in to.
So thank you for being here, thank you for staying here, and here’s to all the good things to come!