We're not just fishing, we're catching
Catching Custom was founded by Brian Mayer, a former professional baseball player with the business name idea from his wife. On a fishing trip, after making the long run towards the Pulley Ridge area, she would let me know her fishing started “when you start catching”. She would wait for the group to find the fish and the bite to pick up before she would start fishing. When everyone would get back to the dock, everyone would joke about it, and she would defend herself and say, “I like to go catching, I don’t like to go fishing”. With Brian being a former catcher during his professional baseball career, the name Catching Custom was born.
Brian has not only been building rods, but teaching rod building since 2021. The initial interest in rod building came from being annoyed for needing someone else to fix a broken guide. After his dad had a custom rod built by an old neighbor for his birthday, Brian took an immediate interest in the process and started learning from watching every video he could find. Not long after during a faculty meeting at the school Brian works at, a group of students got in trouble for watching fishing videos during class. Brian was determined to find a way to turn his students love for fishing into something academic.
Now several years later, Brian’s Rod Building class is now the most popular elective students can take at his school with over 100 kids taking the class each year. Almost every day someone will walk by the classroom, see the fishing rods, and walk in. After a short conversation, they always say,
"If I had this class in school, I would have actually paid attention"
and with that came the idea of doing and hosting seminars for local fishermen teaching them to build their very own fishing rod.
The "Catching" in catching custom
Before getting into rod building, Brian grew up at the Jersey Shore playing sports and going to the beach. Fishing was always something he did whether it was fishing for bass and carp at a local pond or fishing for stripers and fluke from the beaches and inlet. However, fishing was put on hold for a little while Brian was playing college baseball for the University of Delaware. During his 5th season and first year if grad school, fishing became something that was very important to escape the mental and physical demands of being a student-athlete. Brian would explore the state parks for the streams and ponds, wading the creeks and fishing any body of water he found.
After college, Brian would go on to play 3 years of professional baseball as a catcher. During the offseasons in South Florida, Brian would fish every canal on the side of the road he could find or any inlet and pier in the Jupiter area. As a baseball player, he was always obsessed with bats and the different models with the different knobs, handles, barrels, tapers, types of wood, and weighting. As Brian learned more of the specifics of how to fish around his new home, he became obsessed with how different rods worked with different baits and lures. Soon after his playing career ended, Brian moved to the Naples/Marco Island area and began fishing the inshore areas and offshore near Pulley Ridge. The obsession with rods and lures only grew in the pursuit of Snook and Tarpon on spinning rods and now on fly. Also targeting Grouper and American Red Snapper on bait but now through slow pitch jigging.
The old saying “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”; is something that Brian truly embodies with Catching Custom and his classes.
No matter what happens in the world and with technology, only you can go catch a fish and doing it on a rod you built yourself just makes it that much more meaningful and special.
The old saying “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”; is something that Brian truly embodies with Catching Custom and his classes.
No matter what happens in the world and with technology, only you can go catch a fish and doing it on a rod you built yourself just makes it that much more meaningful and special.