For a while, I didn't realize how much I loved my kayak paddle. I knew it was a big step up from my previous paddle, and I really liked it, but never felt like I needed to write about it. An opportunity came along recently that sparked a long chain of events, and really got me thinking. I was fickle at first - perhaps a little wishy-washy-but I can honestly say now that I made the right choice... Werner.

A while back, there was a thread in the Saltwater Kayak Fishing Section of the YakAngler Forum entitled Clearwater/Fort Desoto. Biding my time before I replied, I received an email from Mark saying “This is all you”. So I reached out to Chris Funk, aka Feral One, and made plans to meet near Fort Desoto this weekend. Greg Becker and I were running a little late to meet Chris, who was already on the water ready to go.

With the hustle of the holidays coming to an end and 2012 right round the corner, I took a step back to reflect on what a great year 2011 was for the YakAngler Nation. With many kayak fishing websites being five to ten or more years old, YakAngler is definitely the new kid on the block. October 19, 2011 marked our two-year anniversary. In that short time we have seen our community of active users double, and in 2011 we reached over 160,000 unique visitors.

Today many of you many have noticed YakAngler.com was taken offline for a few minutes. I was updating the core community software for YakSocial. I tested it the best I could last week, but if you notice any bugs please post them in the help forum. Also there are still some minor cosmetic details I need to clean up but the core functionally should be good to go. So what’s new?

Edward Halm from Backwater Paddle Company contacted me yesterday needing some input from YakAngler.com. He wanted to know which of the names provided was best suited for their prototype hand paddle. As I was replying to his email with the name that I though fit the best I thought… Shouldn’t this come for the YA Nation? After all YakAngler would be nothing without our dedicated user base of kayak anglers!