The Cottage Chronicles: Episode 10 - No Rest for the Wicked

Intro

Welcome to The Cottage Chronicles, a show about fishing, family, and finding your way. I'm your host, Neil Colicchio, founder of New Dawn Tackle Company.

It's been a long year, folks. We've finally made it to episode 10. We've just about made it through the fishing season, and now it's time to settle in for a long, cold winter ahead.

Listener Question

I want to talk a little bit this episode about some goals for the coming year, but first, I want to get into a question that came from Greg on Bluesky, and he asks:

It seems to me that most fly-fishing peeps enjoy tying their own flies. It's just part of the sport and hobby, in my opinion. But I've also talked to many who buy and don't tie. Any idea about the percentage of who does what?

I spent some time with this question this morning. I poked around Reddit a little bit. I put it out there to my followers on Bluesky and asked it to my Instagram and Facebook friends as well.

The short answer is I have absolutely no idea.

I'm not primarily a fly angler. I've been fishing with spinning gear for most of my life. I've gone fly fishing a couple of times, but for the most part, I'm just discussing with fly anglers on Bluesky because it's a new platform for me.

The fly fishing community there seems pretty active, and I've had a really tough time getting feedback from my friends and people who listen to the show just across the board. It really doesn't matter what platform.

I want to start fly fishing more. It's not something that I expect to really play into the business too much at this point. I don't intend to start carrying fly fishing gear. There might be some accessories that overlap, like forceps and maybe line nippers and things like that.

I'm not the person who can answer this question from any kind of place of authority. With that said, I mean, I kind of got a gut feeling for it.
I think probably the majority of fly fishing enthusiasts, the majority of anglers that practice fly fishing started by purchasing flies somewhere.

There are people who participate in the sport who just want to go out and catch fish, and they don't necessarily want to spend their hard-earned free time tying flies.

The sport seems to attract people who like to nerd out over the flies and over the prey items that they're trying to present. Based on the handful of people that I've talked to, they're really passionate about their flies. They're very quick to list which ones they'd use under which conditions, which ones have caught the biggest fish, and which ones have caught most consistently.

I would imagine most fly-fishing anglers start with a fly prepared by somebody else, and eventually, they get into tying their own.

That was a very long-winded answer. I wish that I had a better answer for you.

I really don't have any experience in the industry. I don't have a ton of friends who practice fly fishing, and that's part of the reason that I practice fishing with spinning gear and conventional reels. That's what I had access to growing up.
That's what my sort of fishing mentors practiced, so that's what I know best.

But if you've got any experience with this, or if you've got friends or people you know who are involved in the fly fishing industry - people who own shops or make gear, even just enthusiasts who have a better sense of the culture around that sport - absolutely reach out or put them in touch with me. I'd love to have guests on the show in the future.

Goals for 2025

Thinking of things I want to do in the future, I've got some goals for the year ahead, and I've broken them down into three themes. So, I want to talk a little bit about what I want to accomplish professionally, personally, and as an angler in 2025.

The first personal goal I have is to figure out when to rest. This has been so hard over the past year. My son was born just about 12 months ago. We got a puppy about a month after that, and I started a business a few weeks after that.
I have given myself so little time to rest, to recharge, and to plan my path ahead.

It's been awesome to get through some of the crazier days, some of the more stressful times, and even some of the more boring times, just knowing that I always have something to work on. I always have either a distraction, an obligation, or some idea of how I'm going to spend my next free moment. The problem with that is I never step away. I never take time to recharge and to really think about what I'm gonna do.

I think there's great benefit in acting kind of impulsively and intuitively at times. It's been absolutely critical as a dad. It's been really invaluable as a business owner. When I get hung up, when I just don't know what to do, sometimes I do what feels right.

Now, it's time to pause and think about the next moves. Along with that, I really want to plan out my projects and do one at a time. So when I started my business, I started this podcast, I started a blog, I started social media profiles.
I was still trying to navigate what I wanted my brand to be, what I wanted my logo to be, and what I wanted my colors to be. I mean, I started really from scratch. Everything was brand new.

This business was kind of built upon this idea that I had while I was talking with my tattoo artist. I was talking about my day job, talking about some different things I was going through professionally, and I wanted to have something to fall back on.

I knew that I loved fishing, and I wanted to figure out how to weave that into my professional life. I wanted to figure out how to develop something around a hobby that I loved and make the hobby itself a little bit more self-sustaining.

That was a great concept, a great motivator to kind of ignite this fire in me and get this passion going, but I went at it like I do with most projects and it put everything into it. I didn't rest; I didn't necessarily stop and plan things out.
I didn't want to lose that enthusiasm or get distracted or sidetracked.

You know, they talk about not trying to boil the ocean. Well, that's a balance that I'm trying to find in my life in the next year.

My next goal is to take a real vacation, not just paid time off. I do still have a day job. I do work at a computer or in an office five days a week, sometimes more depending on what the project load is.

I had a great paternity leave at the end of 2023 the beginning of 2024. I had an additional few weeks vacation time. I basically just burned them up on arbitrary doctor's appointments, fishing days, and so on. It has been such a long year.

I really, really would love to go somewhere with my wife and my son, get out and do some fishing, try some local beer, go hit up a coffee shop and art museum, just something relaxing, something for a nice break from the day-to-day. So I don't know when it's going to happen, but I absolutely want to take a week and just step away from the fishing business, step away from the office work, and take a real vacation.

As far as professional goals go, I don't want to get deep into my goals for my day job or for my office life. I want to stick to goals that relate to this show and to this business.

The first thing that I want to do is develop a content strategy. It feels like I'm slipping a little bit back into my day job in the marketing world, but I think it's so important. I've got a blog, I've got a podcast, I've got a YouTube channel, I've got an Instagram, a Facebook, a Pinterest account, and now a Bluesky account. I am stretched so thin across different digital platforms, but I really have no strategy for them.

When I release a new podcast episode, I'll put up a graphic that I can post on different platforms. I usually use that on Pinterest and link it out to the blog. I put my episode on Spotify, and I put it on YouTube, but after that, I don't really have a regular schedule. I don't have questions on Tuesdays, fun facts on Fridays, or some other theme on any specific day of the week. It's just basically the first couple of days after my show is posted; I'll post a couple of reels.

If I write a new blog post, the same kind of thing, I'll post it for a couple of days, and then it goes pretty quiet for a while unless I'm actively fishing or have something
specific that I want to say.

What I want to do in the future is have a regular agenda throughout the week.
So basically, depending on what day of the week it is, there are certain platforms that I'll touch and certain themes that I'll touch upon. And I can still go in and have regular interactions in the comments section and post new
pictures and timely stuff, but this would be so useful to just get through kind of the mundane beating-the-algorithm-type activities that we all have to do as creators and as business owners now.

In addition to that, I really want to invest in my YouTube channel. So, right now, I'm just using it to host the podcast, but I haven't actually created any informational content. I haven't posted any videos of fishing along with me.

I think it would be so cool to show some of the lures that I sell in action to show some of my own fishing experience. And then you have a better idea when I'm sitting here and describing them on the podcast, too.

I really want people to be kind of part of my fishing community and part of my world, and I think the easiest way to do that, or maybe the most effective way to do that, would be to actually share the video content with you of what I'm experiencing when I'm out fishing.

Last but not least, as far as professional goals go, I really want to get one of my handmade products out for sale. It might be bucktails. It might be spinners. It might be soft plastics. I've got a bunch of ideas kicking around, some of them partly developed, but I just haven't produced anything in large enough quantities.

So I really want to use some of the cold weather and some of the quiet time this winter to buckle down, get those products produced, and get some stuff on the website.

And now, the part that we've probably all been waiting for, my fishing goals.

So here's one I think probably all of us have had at some point. I really want to catch a new species this year. I had really great success with this in 2024. I caught my first crappie. I caught my first smallmouth bass. I learned loads more about species that I've caught before.

Last but not least, I want to fish some new water. I had an awesome time this year. I fished a lot of the same spots over and over. I brought my dad and my brother there and put them onto some fish. But ultimately, I think a lot of my success was just due to breaking down the same spot, following it kind of throughout the season, seeing the fish come and go, and seeing what was going on there.

It wasn't just down to instinct. I absolutely built an instinct for finding new spots, for kind of figuring out when some of my existing spots would be more likely to hold fish, but I think now it's time to take that and expand.

I want to go to new bodies of water. I want to find some new spots. I want to take those existing techniques and existing lures that worked well for me and see how I can apply them elsewhere. And it's not that I really want to be a fishing guide, but I would really love to reach a point with my fishing skills that I can comfortably go to a new body of water, take a friend along, and get them into fish and help them to understand the passion that I have for the sport.

I don't think everyone is going to instantly take to it. I don't think they're going to fall in love right away, but I want to help them to not have the experience of being bored fishing. I want them to feel pretty confident in me, and I want to be able to feel confident in myself that if we didn't catch fish, it just wasn't meant to be that day. It's not because we're fumbling around. It's not because we lack preparedness or we lack the skill to catch anything.

I want to really have the best chance of success. I want them to experience a great day on the water and one that will keep them coming back for more.

Shop Update and Community Engagement

So, one last topic before I close out the show, and that's just a quick shop update.
I talked about it in the last episode. I just went through a big virtual dealer show this week. I placed some orders that should get here around the first week of March, maybe the second week of March. So I'm expecting to have some cool products up probably closer to the end of the month or maybe the beginning of April.

I stocked up on a bunch of new Vibrax spinners. I got some more Kastmasters, got a bunch of minnows like jerk baits, some; I think I got some swim baits in there, a bunch of soft plastics, a ton of Z-Man stuff. I'm really excited about it. It's stuff that I want to fish. It's stuff that I hope you'll want to fish, too.

So, I'll post about it when it's, when it's finally arrived. I'll probably feature it on the show again, too, but keep an eye out for that in the next couple of months.

Outtro

In the meantime, I'm posting this just before the holidays. If you've still got anybody on your list or if you're looking for some gifts, maybe last-minute or before the new year, check out my guides on the website.

I've got all kinds of tips and tutorials. I've got blog posts on how to build the perfect bass tackle box and how to build the perfect trout tackle box. I've got stuff for people who are just starting out, and I've got stuff for expanding your tackle collection as you go.

If you need tackle, I've got you covered. If you need recommendations, I've got you covered. Reach out on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. I'm on Reddit. Pretty much any platform that you use, you can find me. Everything is under New Dawn Tackle Co.

If you can't find me, feel free to drop a comment on the show itself on this episode. I'd be happy to get in touch with you.

That's all I got for this month. Happy holidays! Don't forget to check me out at newdawntackleco.shop.

Find me on Instagram and Facebook at newdawntackleco, and if you're on Bluesky, join me there. The discussion has been a whole lot of fun. I'm trying to get together a big fishing community there, and I would love for you to be a
part of it.

'til next time, tight lines and happy fishing.