About Region Fishing
Region Fishing started when two longtime friends got fed up with fly shop markups.
Ron Lesseraux had built and scaled Serious Cigars, a successful online cigar business, and understood direct sourcing and fair margins. Mark Yamasaki, a career petroleum engineer and lifelong fly tier who grew up on Colorado tailwaters, was a self-admitted gear snob who fished only four-figure rods from legacy brands.
Then a routine trip to a Houston fly shop turned up a pair of $100 nippers, and the gap between what gear costs to make and what it sells for was impossible to ignore. Over cigars, Ron handed Mark an unbranded prototype rod with one instruction: fish it hard, stress-test it, and don't ask what it cost.
That rod held up on the flats and the tailwaters. Region Fishing was built on that benchmark: angler-tested tools, premium components like Mustad hooks on most of our flies and CNC-machined hardware, and direct accountability without the legacy logo tax.
Team Region — Mark Yamasaki, Captain Chris Daly and Ron Lesseraux — 2019 Team Grand Champions, Islamorada Shark Fly Tournament.
We don't evaluate tackle on paper or pick flies blind from a catalog. We build, rig and fish our own gear where cheap hardware or a weak knot costs you the fish of a lifetime. If a component fails our field tests, it never reaches production.
Co-Founder & Technical Lead
Mark grew up on Colorado rivers during the birth of graphite fly rods, tying commercial flies and building custom rods by age 14. As a petroleum engineer, he approaches tackle the way he approaches a well: failure analysis, material tolerances and structural durability. Chasing permit, tarpon, bonefish and tailwater trout has taken him around the world, with tournament wins and multiple flats Grand Slams caught on Region rods and flies.
Co-Founder & Operations Lead
A Texas native and longtime saltwater angler, Ron spent decades building customer-first e-commerce as the founder of Serious Cigars. His view is simple: good products should sell on materials and performance, not brand markup. After taking up fly fishing seriously alongside Mark, he applied his direct-to-consumer experience to cut out the middlemen and put professional-grade fly gear within reach of every working angler.
Region Fishing is based in Houston, Texas. We stock our own inventory, curate our regional selections, and personally stand behind every fly box, leader and rod that leaves our shop.
Hear the full story on the Fly Fishing Insider Podcast, Episode 42.
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