Houston Fishing Show has plenty of allure
The calendar followed by most folks has spring officially arriving with this Sunday’s vernal equinox. The calendar followed by a goodly portion of Houston-area anglers says different. For 41 years, local freshwater and saltwater anglers have pegged spring’s arrival to the start of the Houston Fishing Show, the largest consumer-focused event of its kind in the nation and a sort of communal gathering of fishers, fishing guides, fishing tackle manufacturers and businesses dealing in boats and other marine equipment used by anglers. For those people, spring arrived Wednesday with the start of the Houston Fishing Show’s March 16-20 run in the George R. Brown Convention Center.
“It’s something that just seems to have been a perfect fit for Houston, where you have such a huge number of fishermen and they can find great fishing in any direction they go,” Dave Holder said of the Houston Fishing Show he has put together each year since 1975 and timed to happen just as much of Texas and its anglers shake off the lethargy of winter.
The Houston Fishing Show attracts a crowd, and not just of antsy anglers. The show’s reputation for drawing the attention of serious fishers who spend serious money means the event is held in similar esteem by the recreational fishing industry. The 300 booths available for exhibitors have been sold out for months and cover the whole of the George Convention Center’s 200,000-square-foot Exhibit Hall A. ‘It’s all fishing’
The event’s success and its standing among exhibitors as well as attendees can be traced to its single-minded focus.
“It’s all fishing,” Holder said. “If it doesn’t have something to do with fishing, it’s not there.”
As such, the Houston Fishing Showhas become the touchstone by which to measure the sometimes mercurial interests of Texas anglers, the status of its fisheries, advances in fishing tackle and other angling-related gear, and a place to glean all manner of information and equipment anglers can use to good effect in coming months.
With the Texas recreational fishing market so huge and Houston-area anglers so diverse in their interests because of the region’s amazing mix of freshwater and saltwater fishing opportunities, it’s no wonder major fishing tackle manufacturers bring their newest gear to the Houston Fishing Show. This year, several reel makers, including market dominating names such as Shimano and Diawa and up-andcoming innovators such as 13 Fishing, are unveiling new bait-casting and spinning reels, with factory representatives staffing booths to show off the new gear and answer anglers questions.
The same applies to rod makers, including national, international and local builders of casting, spinning and fly rods.
Most of those reels and rods, plus hard and soft lures — many of them made by local companies focusing on baits built specifically for Texas fishing situations — will be for sale. The chance to find, handle, assess and purchase quality tackle, often at significantly lower prices, is one of the show’s big attractions. Large displays — mini stores, actually - set up by tackle dealers, including Houston’s Fishing Tackle Unlimited, the largest independent retail tackle store in the world, offer one-stop shopping for anglers rigging out for the start of the heart of Texas’ fishing year. Guides popular
Bet on the booths manned by fishing guides to get lots of traffic. They always do, with anglers probing for information about specific fisheries or looking to arrange trips to try new waters. And this year, look for guides to be peppered with questions on how run off from heavy rains and the resulting bulging lakes and freshwater-swamped bays will affect fishing. With dozens of guides from across Texas and Louisiana, freshwater and saltwater, Houstonarea anglers will have plenty of regional options to consider.
They’ll have plenty of not-so-local options, too. Houston-area anglers are not shy about expanding their fishing horizons and traveling for their recreation. That’s reflected in the several outfitters, guides and tourism officials from far-flung fishing venues such as Alaska, Mexico, Central and South America with booths in the Houston Fishing Show.
This year, that lineup of exotic angling destinations includes a new player.
“Cuba has a booth. That’s a first,” Holder said.
Cuba long has been off limits to anglers from the United States, the result of a travel and trade embargo that for most of the past six decades has made tourist travel to the communist-ruled Caribbean island-nation illegal for U.S. citizens. But with recent moves reestablishing diplomatic ties with between the U.S. and Cuba and plans for easing travel and trade restrictions, Texas anglers soon will be able to legally make trips to fish the island’s legendary largemouth bass fisheries, where bass weighing more than 20 pounds have been landed, or target bonefish, permit, tarpon, billfish and other marine species in waters along Cuba’s coast. Information galore
While fishing in Cuba or some other exotic destination may be an impractical dream for many anglers, a wealth of practical insights and knowledge about angling on more accessible waters is available at no additional charge to show visitors. A series of seminars, all of them focused on a specific fishing location, fish species or fishing tactic, are held almost continually throughout the show.
Those seminars, Holder said, have been one of the event’s most popular attractions. The seminars, most of them conducted by guides who hang around to answer questions after their sessions, cover almost all major fishing areas of the Texas coast and many inland waters. Most of the seminars focus on saltwater fishing, a nod to the incredible popularity saltwater fishing has seen among Houston-area anglers over the past couple of decades.
“When the show began back in the 1970s, about 90 percent of the interest was in freshwater fishing — bass fishing — and 10 percent was saltwater fishing,” Holder said. “Today, that’s swapped 180 degrees; 90 percent of the focus is on saltwater fishing.” Saltwater seminars
The seminar schedule reflects that change. While there are seminars on freshwater fishing — largemouth bass during the pre-spawn and spawning season, striped bass and white bass fishing, catfishing on catfish-rich Lake Conroe — the huge majority of seminars focus on saltwater fishing. They include sessions on almost every bay system in Texas, from Sabine Lake to Baffin Bay, offshore fishing, and seminars on Louisiana’s Lake Calcasieu near Lake Charles and the Venice region at the mouth of the Mississippi.
A complete schedule of seminars is available on the Houston Fishing Show’s website: houstonfishingshow.com.
It’s somehow fitting that the Houston Fishing Show closes on the first official day of spring. Even though fishing never completely shuts down in Texas, it does change with the seasons. And spring’s arrival marks the end of an ebb and the beginning of better days ahead. When the Houston Fishing Show arrives, it’s time to go fishing.