AS YOU can well imagine, working on a fishing magazine with a group of people obsessed with fishing, a lot of our conversations are based around... yep, you’ve got it in one – fishing!
On one of our group video calls last week, the question ‘are there now more carp anglers than all other types of anglers combined?’ was put forward. And it certainly triggered some heated debate!
Globally, given the popularity of bass fishing in America etc, that’s certainly not the case. But within the UK, and including the rest of Europe, it’s a far tougher question to answer.
Of course, getting any definite figures is tricky. Rod licence sales would be a good starting point, but not every multi-rod licence sold is going to be a carp angler because most specimen anglers prefer to fish with two or more rods for a range of species. And then there will be anglers who fish for carp as well as other species.
A look at Google analytics shows that searches for carp fishing by far outweigh those of other styles of angling. As does a quick scan of Instagram hash tags. For example #carpfishing has 4.1m posts as opposed to #matchfishing (91.9k posts) or #seafishing (302k posts). But this only gives you an insight into the search behaviours of a generally younger digital demographic.
I’d guess that in the trade there’s more carp fishing tackle sold than for other forms of angling, but again one carp angler who buys everything in sets of three is more likely to buy more than several general pleasure anglers combined. We debated it for nearly an hour and we didn’t even get close to agreeing on an answer!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on it, though, so do please drop us a line.
