The Conservation Angler has named Dave McCoy, owner of Seattle’s Emerald Water Anglers, as the first member of a new Ambassador Program. The organization emphasizes the program isn’t what the word usually means in fly fishing.
Most ambassador rosters exist to move product. The one TCA announced June 8 from its base in Port Angeles, Washington, is built around conservation standing instead. The people chosen are guides, shop owners, lodge operators, and traveling anglers, selected for their credibility in the wild steelhead community and their influence on how others fish, not for their value as brand promoters. TCA plans to feature one ambassador each week over the coming months, starting with McCoy.
Stewardship on the Water
The program sits under TCA’s Northern Crown Initiative, a network of sentinel rivers running from California to Kamchatka where guides, lodges, and scientists gather the long-term biological data needed to track wild steelhead across their range. The logic of an ambassador roster follows from that: the people who spend the most time on these rivers tend to be the first to notice when a run changes.
“Fly shops and guides are often the first point of contact for new anglers,” said TCA president John R. McMillan. “They shape how people think about fish, rivers, ethics, and conservation.”
McCoy is a sensible first pick. He has run Emerald Water Anglers — a full-service guide operation, retail shop, and travel outfitter in West Seattle — for more than 25 years, and built it into a business known as much for its conservation and inclusion work as its fishing programs. EWA became a carbon-neutral business in 2019 and runs a women’s program staffed by women. Raised near Eugene, Oregon, McCoy points to the North Umpqua as the river where steelhead first became bound up with questions of restraint and responsibility for him.
Trusted Local Voices
TCA science director George Pess made the reasoning plain, describing anglers as the source of “the eyes, experience, and long-term connection to place that make that science stronger.” The organization is betting that trusted local voices, grounded in wild-fish conservation, can move angling culture toward stewardship faster than data can on its own.
That bet is aimed at fish under steady pressure. Wild steelhead across their native range face habitat loss, warming water, harvest, hatchery interactions, and shifting ocean conditions — none of which a monitoring network solves by itself. TCA’s position is that informed anglers and credible messengers are part of the work, not a side effect of it.
