With a mild winter and lack of ice, it’s much easier to spend the time at trade shows talking about fishing with other enthusiasts! I recently spent 5 days at the Toronto International Boat Show where I worked at the Alumacraft booth and did several seminars on the Great Canadian Fish Tank, and kayak fishing demonstrations in The Lake (a flooded hockey rink)!You may be wondering about the Alumacraft booth…. Well, for those of you that haven’t been following along through social media – you may have missed my big news…. I GOT A BOAT!!!
Yes, I am now a boat owner and I proudly spent a few days hanging out in my boat which was on display at the Alumacraft booth! Alumacraft is now on board as a sponsor, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have their support! Thanks to Live2Fish, I did a video walk-through of my boat for those of you that weren’t able to make it to the show! Here it is:
As the video explains, I went with a bass boat style which has tons of storage and space on board. It’s light, durable, safe and will be easy for me to handle. It’ll be great for multi species fishing, and taking friends, kids and my grandpa out! It was a lot of fun spending time in the boat, and great to see lots of people stopping by to say hello! I created a photo album on Facebook called ‘Look who’s in my boat’ and look forward to adding more and more photos to it! My boat will be on display next at the Toronto Sportsmen Show, hope to see you there!
Seminars…. I thought that after doing so many last year, I’d be completely comfortable. It took a few seminars before I felt at ease, and most of the nervousness came before I started speaking. As soon as I got into my presentation, I was fine. It could’ve been my slight fear of heights…
A BIG help was my friend, Dave Chong as he co-hosted my seminars with me. Dave has been fishing competitively for over 20 years, and puts on excellent presentations. It was great to have him there, and I also caught some of his seminars where I picked up some of his secrets! Thanks Dave!
Talking about one of my favourite spring walleye presentations – a bottom bouncer and worm harness!
The Toronto Boat Show has a really unique stage, a LAKE! An entire hockey rink is flooded to allow for boats, kayaks, paddle boats and other watercraft to be tested out! I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to do kayak fishing demonstrations in this lake! I wasn’t nervous at all…. so it must have been the heights thing 🙂
I did demos in the Hobie Revolution and the Pro Angler 12 – both great kayaks!
It’s hard to imagine this week getting better… but I had an amazing surprise waiting for me at the show. Mustang Survival recently launched a brand new blog on their website, and I was asked to be a guest blogger (you can view it here). I’m really happy to support this Canadian company, and they have been known to surprise me a few times… however, this latest surprise has topped anything previous. Mustang had a booth at the show, and I was asked to stop by when I had time to pick a little something up. To my surprise….
They created an ‘Ashley Rae’ signature PFD… the second I laid eyes on it, I held back tears. What a thoughtful and wonderful surprise! Thank you, Mustang! What a week!
Thanks to everyone that made it out to the show, stopped to say hello and those that have been following everything through Facebook! It’s great to have so much support from near and far!
I’m back home in Quinte, and the wind tore up the ice all weekend. The good news is that the temperature is dropping (and staying) all week so the ice should be good soon – I am so anxious to get into some walleye! It just doesn’t seem right not sharing some fishing pics…
Hopefully my next blog is about some Quinte gold! Send cold thoughts my way 🙂