The story of our showsTen years ago when we started this program we were the staff of a Broadcast TV Station, an affiliate station for one of the networks, located in Scranton, Pennsylvania. We needed to fill the space for a Hunting show that went belly-up right in the middle of the Broadcast season. Quite quickly we put together our own idea for a Local Fly Fishing show. All of us would chip together and produce the show ourselves. Oh yeah, my name is Charlie Charlesworth. I was the only Fly Fisherman of the group that also had on-air experience hosting talk shows as well as hosting info-mercials and Holiday specials. I agreed to host the series providing we all agreed that we would be totally honest about our levels of experience (who would have known that I would eventually become a Fly Fishing Professional) and that all hook-ups and landings would be real and none of these fake hook-ups like those we’ve seen with other shows using coke bottles on the bottom, making a snag look like a hook-up or the hand off from the guy in the next boat. The show was started with the premise that I am not a professional but I was going to find professionals and their home streams who would teach me and I invited the viewing audience to come along At the end of our first season we asked for comments from our viewers as to why they liked the show. The overwhelming response was it was both "entertaining" and "educational". Which was exactly what we wanted. We wanted them to go away with a better knowledge of the sport and knowledge of all the great trout streams in Pennsylvania. The series was a success, they got history lessons, casting lessons, fly tying lessons, habitat and conservation efforts, along with maintaining their interest for an entire half hour (entertaining). The decision was made to continue the show and that we would expand the area to anywhere we could drive and film a show over the weekend (sometimes leaving a skeleton crew at the station on Fridays. With the expansion of the show to episodes in Tennessee, Vermont, New York and Massachusetts came the need for a name change. The second season we became known as “Fly Fishing the Northeast”. We stuck to the same premise of realism and educational. Now we were like a road show. We struck out from our home base in Scranton and showed the audience how to get to great fishing destinations that were all within a five hour drive. Most of which were on major US arteries. We continued that season with the same success. It was now time for an even greater expansion.
For our third season it would require another name change. We had now expanded from the greater northeast to shows in Tennessee, Florida and the Bahamas. We loved the outdoors, we now loved to Fly to our destinations and we were of course Fly Fisherman. The only name that fit was “Outdoors on the Fly”. We also moved into other Markets. We were now in Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Albany and of course Scranton.
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