Within a month of deciding he was going to fish from a kayak, Jeff Little found himself temporarily pinned under a submerged log after tumbling from his kayak in the Upper Potomac River. He surfaced downstream of the strainer without his eyeglasses, camera and tackle box and thought, “Man, I really need to take a class!”

Gary Bulla’s kayak fishing journey started with a whippy stick. He wanted to wave his fly rod at saltwater fish, especially those he couldn’t reach from the beach. “I knew if I had a kayak I could get out there more often, get into places boats couldn’t take me,” Bulla recalls. It was the mid-‘80s, long before the birth of the contemporary kayak fishing movement. “My first kayak was an old Prism. It’s not made anymore,” Bulla says. Bulla fished Santa Barbara harbor a lot in those days, catching calicos in the kelp beds. He loved the freedom of the self-powered. After a while, his hobby grew into a vocation and he hung up his guide shingle.