Central Oregonians are growing the popular website Catch Magazine

By Mark Morical / The Bulletin

Nobody was killed or even seriously injured. But Todd Moen was done with traveling to remote locales as a videographer for a company that produces fishing and outdoors television shows.

“Twenty minutes later, a guy on a mo-ped shows up to help,” Moen recalls, laughing. “I'm so lucky I lived, and nobody got hurt. ... It was unbelievable. After that, I was over traveling, because I was on the road all the time for two years.”

Moen moved from Montana to Bend in 2006, and after a couple of years producing website video for The Bulletin, he moved on to pursue his dream of creating an online magazine dedicated to fly-fishing photos and videos.

Moen, who now lives in Sisters, partnered with renowned fly fisherman and photographer Brian O'Keefe, of Powell Butte, to launch Catch Magazine in September 2008.

Two years later, the free online publication has become a worldwide sensation — at least in the niche fly-fishing community. And Moen never has to travel too far to get his videos.

According to O'Keefe, Catch Magazine (www.catchmagazine.net) has been viewed by readers from 138 countries, and the November 2010 issue (No. 14) has received 200,000 hits.

New issues are released in alternating months on the first day of each January, March, May, July, September and November, and viewers can subscribe to Catch to receive e-mail updates.

Moen and O'Keefe travel every now and then to produce material for the magazine, but they also rely on contributors from around the world, including regular writers and photographers from Colorado, Spain and Germany.

The website features prominent “left” and “right” arrows on which viewers can click to move through the magazine to different “pages” of photos and videos.

“It kind of just took off,” says Moen, 34. “If you know what left arrow and right arrow means and you don't speak English, you can figure it out.”

O'Keefe explains that Catch is about entertainment — creating visuals that can captivate even non-anglers. The website does not include news, reviews, or how-to articles. In fact, words are few and far between in Catch Magazine.

“I wanted a more visual paper magazine that was driven by graphics and not just big articles,” says O'Keefe, 56, who has contributed to nearly every major outdoor magazine over the last 30 years. “So we decided to do something online, and drive it toward bold graphics and great photography.”

O'Keefe says the best compliment that he and Moen have received was from an obsessive fly angler who explained how his wife had been browsing through Catch Magazine and after a time told him: “Now I know why you fly-fish.”

“It's grown by leaps and bounds,” O'Keefe says. “It's free and online, and there's no holding it back. It's a lesson in geography. There are fly fishermen all over the world. People e-mail us from Kuwait.”

Because Catch Magazine is free, Moen and O'Keefe generate revenue only from advertisers, whose photo-heavy ads do not clutter the visual experience. O'Keefe says he and Moen are making a small profit.

“We're still poor,” O'Keefe says. “We've got some great advertisers, and we're getting there. We're about where we thought we'd be in a couple years.”

Moen, who is married and has a 2-year-old son and an 8-month-old daughter, says Facebook and “word-of-mouth” through the online fly-fishing community have helped the website grow in popularity. Catch has a Facebook page and a blog.

“You get somebody who loves it so much and they have a contact list of 200 friends, and it gets around that way,” Moen explains.

According to O'Keefe, Catch Magazine currently has about 700 subscribers in Bend — and many more around the world.

O'Keefe, who is married with no children, was finishing up a 25-year career as a fly-fishing tackle sales representative before helping to launch Catch in late 2008, and Moen was making his career transition post-plane crash.

“We were mutually segueing toward unemployment at a bad time,” O'Keefe says, laughing.

O'Keefe estimates that he has embarked on more than 100 international fly-fishing trips throughout his career as a photographer and sales rep. He makes time to fish while working on Catch, and Moen grinds away behind the scenes.

During a recent two-week trip to British Columbia to produce steelhead video, Moen says he made only six casts with his fly rod.

“Photography and videography are so different,” Moen says. “I love to fish, too. Brian makes sure he gets his fishing in. If I put my camera down, I will miss the best shot of the trip.”

Mark Morical can be reached at 541-383-0318 or at mmorical@bendbulletin.com.