Happy 10th Anniversary to Us!

Ten years ago last week, We launched Orvis News–at the old address, orvisnews.com–and Monday marked the tenth anniversary of my becoming an Orvis associate. (I had been working a freelancer for a few months already.) So I thought we’d quickly look back and see how far we’d come.

Our very first post was “In the Loop 9.20.10,” featuring links to other interesting stories around the Web. (Sadly, those links are now dead, which is one of the side effects of running a daily blog.) Next up, was our first video post: the trailer for “Tapâm – a flyfishing journey.” That turns out to have been a pretty prescient choice, kicking off our commitment to featuring great videos from around the world, as the “Tapâm” trailer has racked up more than 231,000 views on vimeo since then.

That first day also offered posts on fishing big, ugly streamers in fall, as well as my introduction as the blog editor.  Our first trivia challenge came on November 18, followed by our first Film Festival (not yet dedicated to Fridays) on  the 24th. When you look at these old posts, there are probably formatting problems, due to our redesign and switch to WordPress in 2013, but many of the photos, videos, and tips hold up well even today.

When we started, none of us knew where this project would take us, but we had high hopes. Many of those have been fulfilled, thanks to a great online readership. There are more than 10,000 posts still active, which means that there is a ton of content available to anyone who wants to dig. I urge you to poke around by clicking on the tags, such as fly-fishing tips or fly-tying videos, which appear at the bottom of every post. You can also use the search bar in the upper right.

Huge thanks to all of you who read the Orvis Fly Fishing blog and who help make this a vibrant community by commenting below posts, submitting your original content, offering suggestions for how we can make things better, and letting us know when we’ve dropped the ball. We look forward to the next ten years!