The Region Fishing Ethos: Performance Without the Pretense

Fly fishing has a split market. Gear you can trust usually carries a luxury tax: $1,000 rods and $500 reels that pay for big marketing budgets and lifestyle branding. At the other end are cheap, unvetted imports that look fine in a photo and fail the first time a tarpon rolls or a heavy brown turns into the current.

We started Region Fishing in 2018 because we were tired of choosing between the two.

That's also why this blog is back, launching alongside our rebuilt website. Start by picking the water you fish: Freshwater, Saltwater or All Waters. The whole site shifts with you, from the homepage to the menus. A trout angler doesn't wade through tarpon flies, and a redfish angler doesn't scroll past midges. Fish both? Stay on All Waters and see everything. Less filtering, more fishing. From there you can narrow by species, fly type or hook size, and reorder past purchases in a few clicks. Take a look around and tell us what you'd change.

Who we are

Ron Lesseraux and I came at this from two different directions. I've spent more than 30 years as a petroleum engineer running production operations, where equipment failure costs real money. I look at a fly rod, a reel drag, or a hook the same way: where are the loads, where does it fail, and is it worth the price?

Ron brought decades of e-commerce and logistics experience from building Serious Cigars. Between us, we knew how to judge quality and how to get it to anglers efficiently.

The plan was simple: build gear that working guides want to use, and sell it at an honest price by cutting out the legacy retail markup. We've done it on our own capital, with no outside investors, and every dollar keeps going back into the business: new flies, new boxes, new rods. That's also why we can't afford to sell junk.

Flies first

Flies are the heart of Region Fishing. They're hand-tied at our own factory by tiers who have tied our patterns for years and know how each fly should be proportioned and how it should ride in the water. Every order is inspected, packed and shipped from Houston.

A few choices we make on purpose:

• Hooks built for Region. Most of our standard flies are tied on Mustad Heritage hooks. Now we're going a step further: we're partnering with Mustad to build custom hooks, made only for Region flies. Each design starts from the Heritage line and is shaped by what our guides and customers tell us on the water.
• Micro barbs you can pinch. Flatten the barb with your forceps and you're fishing barbless wherever the regs require it.
• Barbless jigs. Following the barbless tradition, every jig and tenkara hook we tie on is barbless out of the box.
• Better materials from the source. We source the best materials we can find, and we're now big enough to work with manufacturers directly so what goes into our flies holds up.

Purple Prince Nymph, shot with focus-stacked macro.

You know our flies. Meet our rods.

Most anglers find us through a fly box. What surprises them is that our rods may be the best thing we make. They're built to the same standard as our flies: honest materials, honest price, and no paying extra for a logo.

The proof is in Belize. I've fished the same set of Region rods there for six years on permit, bonefish, tarpon and snook. The only thing I've ever replaced is the fly line. The lineup runs from a 3-weight for small creeks to a 12-weight for tarpon, and we've just reshot all of them, so take a closer look.

Tested where it counts

We test gear because we love to fish, and I'm rough on equipment. If something survives me, it will hold up for just about anyone. Most of my time on the water is in the salt, so that's where our saltwater flies and rods take their beating.

Team Region: Mark Yamasaki, Captain Chris Daly and Ron Lesseraux, 2019 Team Grand Champions, Islamorada Shark Fly Tournament.

• Belize. Belize is my home water. I've spent more than 150 days on the flats there with guide Max Neal, fishing Region gear the whole time. In that time our flies and rods have landed permit, bonefish, tarpon and snook, including several grand slams.
• The Texas Gulf Coast. Lately I've gotten hooked on the Texas coast. Most trips I'm running out of Port O'Connor on a buddy's skiff. He's a local, part guide and part fishing partner, and it's about as unpolished as fishing gets. That's exactly where our redfish flies earn their spot in the box. It's also where we fish with A-Team Anglers, one of the groups we sponsor.
• The Florida Keys. We fish the Keys with Capt. Chris Daly. Ron, Chris and I fished together as Team Region and won Team Grand Champion at the 2019 Islamorada Shark Fly Tournament. Every year we also fish the Herman Lucerne Memorial in the Everglades.
• Colorado. Guide Andy Stutz has fished our original prototypes since the beginning, and his feedback still shapes what we build.
• The White River. Six years of trips to the Bull Shoals tailwater near Cotter, Arkansas: 2,555 fish landed, 173 trout over 18 inches, and every angler on every trip has caught fish. The biggest so far is Ron's 22-incher. See the results.

Anglers on the 2026 White River trip, Cotter, Arkansas.

When something fails out there, it gets redesigned or dropped.

Supporting the sport

The events and clubs that grow fly fishing are where a lot of good anglers start, so we put money behind them. We sponsor the Herman Lucerne Memorial in the Everglades, the Red Fish Rodeo, A-Team Anglers, and many Fly Fishers International (FFI) events.

Built with you

Some of our best sellers started as customer requests, including the Blowtorch, the White Zonker and the October Caddis. If there's a pattern you can't find, or one you'd like tied differently, tell us. If it fishes, we'll build it.

What's coming

The next year is about assortments built for specific water, not random handfuls of flies.

• A large saltwater box. A full saltwater assortment in our new extra-large streamer box.
• New rods. We're testing new freshwater and saltwater rods to fill gaps in our lineup. Every one was requested by guides.
• A better look at our flies. New photography of our fly catalog is on the way. I'm shooting every fly myself with focus-stacked macro photography, so you can see the exact thread wraps, proportions and resin finishes before you buy.

This journal is where we'll show the work: field reports, breakdowns of how our gear is built, and the flies and tactics working on the water right now.

See you on the water

Region Fishing is built for the angler who cares more about how a rod loads, fires and fights than about the logo above the cork. You shouldn't have to overpay to fish well, or gamble on gear that won't hold up.

In February I fished the Seychelles and came home with a notebook full of ideas for new flies and gear. That trip is the next post.

Until then, if you have a question about a pattern, a hook, or where to fish it, ask us. We'd rather talk fishing than sell you something you don't need.

Tight lines.

— Mark Yamasaki, Region Fishing

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