Paul Arden | Wednesday, 4 October 2023
The first 5 months of Sexyloops was not particularly dramatic. Weekly I would check its almost non-existent progress from the free library internet in Noosa. Some weeks we would get as many as ten new visitors! But there wasn’t much to see or reason to come in the first place. So in April 1999 I sat down and wrote the Sexyloops flycasting manual. Admittedly it wasn’t actually a “manual” on the first draft, but instead seven long pages of content. This took me ten days and I would regularly pop out to the garden to check a few things.
That was the beginning of Sexyloops. I also started a weekly newsletter at this time and expanded the contents of the shop. This bounced along merrily for a while. At this point there were only two resources of flycasting information on the Internet; Sexyloops and another website called “Slowsnap”. Unfortunately that one disappeared — I say unfortunately because there really was some first class content on those pages.
A rapid expansion period happened when a chap called Steve became involved. Steve had lots of exciting ideas and we built sections within Sexyloops: The Beginners section, Imaginary Saltwater, Pic of the Day, the Stillwater section (which was a mini book I had written back in ‘96) and very importantly… The Board.
I think it’s fair to say that the Board has probably made more advances to flycasting knowledge and understanding than pretty much anything else, before or since. In some ways it’s almost like a light switch was turned on. Suddenly you had all these pockets of information from around the world, discussing flycasting in one place. This really was a quite remarkable time, and still is. Furthermore, digital cameras started to appear in the early 2000s — my first one cost me a whopping £650 — and this made a huge impact to our understanding, as I’m sure you can imagine. Prior to digital cameras for example, we thought that the haul *ended* at maximum tip deflection and that the rod then catapulted the line out!
Also, around this time, we did something quite novel. I had been making new front pages for Sexyloops on a regular basis (which was an enormous amount of work). Firstly we went 5 days a week, bringing in friends to help with content, and then, quite quickly afterwards, in 2001, we went 7 days a week. However we only had 6 writers! Fortunately God stepped in, with his infinite wisdom, and ran the Sunday page for us! That was slightly controversial… I can’t possibly think why :)))
From my perspective, running Sexyloops has always been fun. For years I used to upload pages from the top of hills when travelling (“Sexyloops coming from a hill top near you!”). This was because my laptop would drain the truck battery and I would have to bump start my way back down again. I’ve had conversations with others, on the Board, while sitting next to a campfire on the side of the river… this was regular occurrence.
Mobile uploading is taken for granted nowadays, but back then most websites were being delivered from offices and not strung together on the fly, while travelling, fishing and trying to stay out of trouble — and often failing!
I’ve always enjoyed having the daily Front Page fishing writers from around the globe, who we get to know over time, learning about their fishing lives and locations. We have certainly been lucky over the years, to have had such extremely knowledgable fly fishermen delivering informative, humorous and occasionally downright mad FPs! Thank you very kindly good friends; together we have done something really quite special. :)))
There has been so much more of course. Shootouts, Sexyloops gatherings, slightly mad DVDs, the video manual/APP, the Sexyloops brand of Hot Torpedo rods. Hopefully we never start to take ourselves too seriously, because, after all, we are trying to catch fish on feathers so that we can put them back! Apart from this being the meaning of life, it’s not serious at all!
Roll on the next 25 :)))
Cheers, Paul