The Flyfish Journal
The Flyfish Journal is a quarterly magazine devoted to fly fishing as a culture, a landscape, and a way of spending time outdoors, rather than simply as a technique to be mastered. Based in Bellingham, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest, it publishes four issues per volume in a large, carefully produced print format built around expansive photography, long-form essays, interviews, and travel writing. The official website is theflyfishjournal.com. From its launch in 2009, the journal set out to be kept rather than discarded — a collectible, coffee-table chronicle that readers return to long after a season has passed. That ambition, paired with limited advertising, clean design, and a deliberate refusal to fill its pages with routine instruction, has given it a distinct place among American fly-fishing publications and a loyal following well beyond its home state.
Overview and Identity
At its core, The Flyfish Journal presents itself as an independent and cultural voice for fly fishing. Instead of leading with tackle tests or step-by-step lessons, it foregrounds the people who define the sport, the waters they fish, and the conservation questions that surround those waters. Its subject matter ranges widely: a profile of a casting legend can sit alongside a remote river journey, a gallery of fishing art, or a reflective personal essay about failure, weather, and friendship on the water.
The magazine is published in English and appears quarterly, with each annual volume made up of four numbered issues. By the mid-2020s the journal had reached its seventeenth volume, and single issues and subscriptions continued to be sold through its own online store alongside back issues and merchandise. Readers can choose print subscriptions with home delivery or digital access that includes downloadable editions, reflecting a readership that values the physical object but also reads on screens while travelling. That dual existence — a deliberately archival print journal supported by a website, films, web features, podcasts, blogs, and events — is central to how the title understands itself. Print remains the flagship, but it is not the whole publication.
Origins and Launch in Bellingham
The Flyfish Journal was developed over nearly two years before it appeared in late August 2009. It is published by Funny Feelings LLC, a Bellingham-based media company focused on outdoor cultures. The launch announcement described a publication intended to stand apart through printing quality, paper, photographic reproduction, and restrained design. The first issue brought together established fly-fishing writers and photographers, helping to signal from the outset that the new title aimed at literary and visual quality rather than newsstand volume.
Publisher Jeff Galbraith has often been identified as the driving figure behind the launch. A tenth-anniversary reflection published by the journal traces part of its inspiration to an early Fly Fishing Film Tour screening in Bellingham, at the Mount Baker Theatre, and in particular to a film about pioneering a demanding Baja fishery without the usual apparatus of guides, celebrities, or large budgets. The energy in that room — anglers responding to adventure, absurdity, and devotion to a moment on the water — suggested to the founders that the same feeling could be captured in a permanent, archival print format. The anniversary account also credits a wide circle of early supporters and contributors, and notes that the high cover price discussed before launch drew scepticism in the trade at the time. That scepticism did not prevent the journal from finding its audience; a decade later the editors were able to look back on a growing community built around print issues, films, and online work.
Publisher, Sister Titles, and the Bellingham Base
Funny Feelings LLC is best known for three related quarterly journals. The sequence begins with the snowboarding title launched by Galbraith in 2001, originally known as frequency and later as The Snowboarder's Journal, followed by The Ski Journal in 2007 and then The Flyfish Journal in 2009. Galbraith, a former editor at a snowboarding magazine who attended Western Washington University, built the company in Bellingham rather than in a larger publishing centre. That location matters. Bellingham sits between Puget Sound, the Cascade foothills, and the rivers of northwest Washington and nearby British Columbia, with steelhead, salmon, and mountain culture close at hand. The journal has described itself as owned by fly fishers and produced near the water, a line that reflects both geography and self-image.
The business address used for subscriptions and submissions has long been in Bellingham — a post office box for mail and an Irongate Road address for courier deliveries. Keeping the three journals under one small, independent house has allowed a shared approach to cross over between sports: long stories, strong photography, cultural history, and respect for the eccentric personalities who sustain a pursuit over a lifetime. Funny Feelings has also produced special projects, books, short films, and custom content, but the journals remain its public identity, and the fly-fishing title applies that house style to rivers, flats, and oceans instead of slopes.
An Editorial Philosophy That Avoids How-To
The most frequently repeated story about The Flyfish Journal is what it decided not to publish. At launch, Galbraith explained the concept through a humorous exchange in which he ruled out casting instruction, river maps, and fly-tying tips one by one, accepting the joke that a magazine without those staples might sound wilfully impractical. Beneath the joke was a serious editorial choice. Practical information was already widely available elsewhere, and increasingly online. What was scarcer, in the founders' view, was a well-made home for the stories that explain why anglers care in the first place.
In practice that means emphasis on landscapes, people, adventure, and conservation, and less emphasis on lists of patterns or tactical shortcuts. A feature may still teach a reader a great deal — about a fishery's ecology, a guide's working life, a region's history, or the pressures facing a river — but it does so through narrative and reporting rather than through a lesson plan. Editors and outside commentators have since described the journal as moving beyond tips and tricks to treat fly fishing as a lifestyle and a literary subject, using deeper insight, unexpected angles, and artistic photography while keeping the sport approachable. That balance has helped it avoid becoming either a trade manual or a purely nostalgic keepsake.
Photography, Design, and the Coffee-Table Format
Visual presentation is not decoration for The Flyfish Journal; it is part of its argument. Large-format photography, generous white space, and a clean, semi-minimal layout let images carry narrative weight. Early staff appointments underline that priority: Tim Romano served as the first photo editor, and photographer Copi Vojta became one of the names most closely associated with the journal's look over its first decade. Galleries, photo essays, and artwork appear as features in their own right, not merely as illustrations squeezed around text.
Reviewers of fly-fishing magazines regularly single the journal out for this visual standard, describing its pages as uncluttered and its imagery as standing out precisely because the design does not compete with it. Artists as well as photographers contribute, and the journal has showcased painting, mixed media, and illustration connected to fish and rivers. The result is a magazine designed to live on a shelf or table. Its publishers have long used the language of archival and collectible production, and back issues are marketed as objects worth keeping and completing, rather than as disposable monthly reading. That approach also supports the price positioning established at launch: fewer, more substantial quarterly issues instead of frequent, thinner ones.
What Readers Find Inside
A typical volume moves restlessly around the fly-fishing world. Early issues already ranged from Montana trout water and Iceland in the first issue to the Dean River in British Columbia, the mangroves and crocodile country of Australia, and an unusual account of trout reported inside the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. Later work in the journal's first decade took readers to Bhutan's Drangme Chhu in pursuit of golden mahseer, to Ethiopia, to Bosnia's Ribnik River, to South African yellowfish, to permit fishing in Oman, and to winter steelhead camps on the Washington coast. Salt water and fresh water, famous rivers and obscure ones, sit side by side.
The human range is just as wide. The journal has profiled Joan Wulff and explored her long casting and teaching life, interviewed guides with extraordinary client histories, and published comic, self-deprecating essays about whitefish, carp, walleye, musky, and other species that rarely receive reverent treatment elsewhere. Humour is a recurring register alongside elegy and adventure: contributors write about ruined plans, bad weather, eccentric companions, and the suspicion that fishing has complicated their lives as much as it has enriched them. Conservation and access run through many stories without turning every feature into a lecture, reflecting a culture in which affection for a place tends to bring responsibility for it. For many readers, that mix — serious reporting, literary essay, art, and irreverence — is the journal's signature.
Editors and Contributors
Several editorial generations have shaped the title. Andrew Steketee was among its early editors, and Ben Romans, previously an associate editor at another fly-fishing magazine and the author of a book on Montana fly fishing, took over as editor in early 2011 after Steketee's departure. Steve Duda then held the editorship for more than six years, a tenure the journal marked on his stepping back in 2018 as elegant and powerful in its influence on the magazine's voice. Jason Rolfe succeeded Duda in August 2018. A Washington native and respected guide, Rolfe brought a background in creative writing from the University of Washington and a second career as a live-storytelling organiser and podcast host. Publisher Galbraith praised his enthusiasm for the sport and his eye for content on his appointment, and Duda remained part of the wider journal family as a contributor.
In February 2020 Colin Clancy joined as associate editor, adding experience across the sister journals and other outdoor publications, as well as work as an illustrator. Around the editors sits a broad contributor base drawn from fishing, writing, photography, and art — names such as Dylan Tomine and Kirk Deeter were encouraging the project before it launched, and guides, filmmakers, and freelance writers from across North America and beyond have filled its pages since. Because pieces are often selected well ahead of publication, the journal functions in part as a slow, curated anthology of contemporary fly-fishing writing rather than a rapid news outlet.
Beyond Print: Digital, Film, and Live Storytelling
Although print defines it, The Flyfish Journal has never been print only. Its website was conceived at launch as a place for contributors and readers to share stories, follow independent projects, and encounter the same quality of work between issues. Over time that digital presence grew to include online exclusives, films, a digital edition platform where issues can be read page by page, and an app edition that historically offered the four annual issues by subscription through mobile stores. Social channels and video extend individual features and photography to audiences who may first meet the journal away from the printed page.
Live storytelling has become a particularly visible extension. In 2015 editor Jason Rolfe founded Writers on the Fly, a reading series devoted to fly-fishing writers, which grew into tours featuring well-known voices from the culture. A Bellingham edition in May 2016 combined storytelling, photography, and a benefit for Western Washington University's Liam Wood Flyfishing and River Guardian School, tying the journal's community work back to its home town and to education about rivers. Rolfe has also hosted The Fly Tapes podcast, built around interviews with authors and artists in fly fishing. Together these projects show a small magazine behaving as a cultural hub: convening people in rooms, on stages, and online, and not only on paper.
Subscriptions, Submissions, and Practical Details
The journal is sold by subscription for one or two years — four or eight issues — with different pricing for United States, Canadian, and other international delivery, as well as a digital-only option. Current subscription offers listed on its store include online access with downloadable editions, home delivery for print subscribers, and a discount on merchandise and back issues for the duration of a subscription. Single recent issues are also sold individually, and subscribers are typically started with the next issue unless they add the current one to their order. That model suits a quarterly: each issue is an event, promoted in advance and then kept available as part of a numbered back catalogue.
For writers and photographers who hope to contribute, the journal publishes detailed submission guidance. It asks contributors to allow a long response time, explains that editorial decisions are commonly made at least three months before an issue appears and often six to twelve months in advance, and advises writers to think carefully about seasonality. Manuscripts are requested in a specified, conventional format, with identifying information in the header and one submission per document, and work that ignores the guidelines may be returned unread. Submissions can be sent by post to the Bellingham address, by courier to the Irongate Road office, or by email. The rigour of those instructions reflects the volume of interest in a small, highly curated quarterly.
Place in Fly-Fishing Culture
The Flyfish Journal occupies a specific niche in American outdoor media. It is national and international in reach — its stories and subscribers cross borders — but it is unmistakably a Pacific Northwest production, made by a small independent company in a college and port town near the Canadian border. In a period when many print titles contracted or disappeared, it persisted by doing the opposite of chasing frequency: publishing less often, charging more per issue, investing in paper and photography, and trusting that a devoted readership would support quality over volume. Its sister titles in skiing and snowboarding followed a similar logic, suggesting a house-wide bet on culture-driven print that has now lasted, across the company, since 2001.
For directory purposes, the essential facts are straightforward: The Flyfish Journal is a quarterly fly-fishing magazine based in Bellingham, Washington, United States, published by Funny Feelings LLC, founded in 2009 under publisher Jeff Galbraith, and available in print and digital form through theflyfishjournal.com. Its lasting interest lies in how it defines its subject. By treating fly fishing as stories, places, images, and people first — and as instruction only incidentally — it has become a record of what the sport means to those who practise it, as much as a guide to how it is done.
