From Skateboarding to Drugs to Fly Fishing

A Redemption Story for The Young Pa. Angler that Started "Housefly Fishing"

To hear Sean Witman tell it, he once was lost but now he’s found. And he has fly fishing and a 12-step program to thank for it.

Witman, 29, is one of the owners of Housefly Fishing, a fly shop located just steps from the banks of the Lackawaxen River in Hawley, Pa. in the Northern Poconos.  He opened the shop in April 2021 with two partners.  Before opening the shop, he had leveraged Instagram to establish a worldwide reputation for tying premium flies. 

And his business is thriving thanks, in part, to the pandemic, he said.  “The Covid fly fishing boom has been the most significant bump in the industry since the film “A River Runs Through it’.”

By all appearances, Witman doesn’t look like he has ever had a dark thought. He is what people used to call a “long tall drink of water:” thin, boyish, with light brown hair who looks like he barely needs to shave.  He’s soft spoken and charming and still looks like the high school kid who loved to practice ollies with his skateboarding buddies. 

Except that Sean is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who has been clean for seven years. “There was a lot of darkness,” he said. “Anxiety and depression were a really big part of my life experience.”

He started in high school with marijuana and alcohol and things accelerated from there. “I was taking prescription pills, opioids, Xanax, speed, you name it,” he said.

Was there any trauma or family issues that led to the darkness?  Absolutely not, he said. “I was really well-behaved until high school. I had a great upbringing and a great family.”

Witman explained that, like many teenagers, he just allowed his thoughts to get very dark. ”I had a distorted perspective and an internal dialog that left me depressed and anxious,” he said. “It was more of a sense that the way the world was structured was just unfair and couldn’t accommodate me.”

Thankfully, Witman recognized he had a problem and sought help. “I’ve spent countless hours in counseling,” he said. He also logged five months in rehab centers.

But what really made the difference was a 12-step program and fly fishing.

Witman grew up fishing with spinning gear in the rivers and lakes around Wilkes Barre, Pa. But his true love was skateboarding.

One day when he was 17, he was out with friends, making a skateboarding video as skateboarders do. They were near a river ( Sean won’t name the river because it already gets too much fishing pressure). And he saw a fly fisherman catching trout. 

It looked cool.  So he bought a fly rod and a box of flies at Wal-Mart.  They were wet flies though back then Sean didn’t know a streamer from a nymph.  But they looked buggy enough and when he returned to the river, he rigged one onto a leader.  Though he had no idea how to cast a fly line, Sean managed to huck a cast out into the current. He was just trying to imitate that angler he had met before.  Somehow, Sean managed to get that wet fly to float and drift like a dry fly.  And damned if he didn’t catch a brown trout.

Anyone who has ever fallen in love with fly fishing knows what happened next. Sean became obsessed.  He started learning to read water, and began studying the entomology of rivers and trout feeding patterns. He also found a mentor in Jim Misiura, a local fly fishing guru with his own internet following on YouTube.  Over the next two years, Witman spent over 300 days on the river.

He also found that fly fishing worked better than drugs at stopping the dark thoughts. “Fly fishing was my escape,” he said. ”It was literally the only time in the worst moments of my addiction where I felt any sense of peace or ease.”

Of course, it took more than angling to find his way out of the darkness. He found a 12-step program. And he found the steps had room for fly fishing.  Anyone familiar with these programs knows that a key element is the idea of turning your life over to a higher power. Witman doesn’t subscribe to any established religion other than The Exalted Salvation Ministries of the Surface Feeding Trout. His sanctuary is the West Branch of the Delaware River. And the closest thing he has to a prayer book is a fly box.

But Witman said fly fishing really is a key element to his spirituality.  “Fishing forces me to be present in the moment,” he said. “That’s what a spiritual program does.”

During his recovery from substance abuse, he discovered he had a talent for fly tying.  He started posting photos of his flies on his Instagram page (@sean_witman).   There were Frenchies, Sparkle Duns, Rabbit Zonker Streamers not to mention boxes and boxes of the Euro Nymphs that were becoming so popular. 

Before long his online followers started becoming customers. He began shipping his flies around the country and then around the world.

And these weren’t the 75 cent flies you can buy by the dozen on ETSY.  These were bespoke premium boxes tied for specific trips and locations like Chopaka Lake in Washington State. A client would want a small pheasant tail nymph with a wide gap hook and an oversized tungsten bead. Another client texted: “I have these bait fish in my system that have a dark olive hue on top and a silver belly. Can you tie something like that?”

At 3 to 4 dollars per tie, his Instagram fly tying gig was soon paying more than his $10 an hour job packing and shipping hair care products from a warehouse in West Pittston, Pa. 

His side gig took off during Covid when everyone wanted safe, socially-distanced activities and fly fishing fit the bill.   And while the big fly suppliers may have had problems fulfilling orders due to supply chain glitches, Sean had no problem at all.  So he went all in on the fly tying business. 

Sean sold one of his first fly boxes to Dan Santoro, another Pennsylvania fly angler and tattoo artist. The two became friends and started fishing together. Eventually, Santoro would tattoo a diving brown trout on Witman’s left thigh. 

“During Covid, I pitched the idea of doing something more,” said Witman. By “more”, he meant a brick and mortar fly shop as well as a clothing line that combined the fly fishing and skateboarding aesthetic. “We felt that the fly fishing world needed a brand that more suited our tastes,” he said. 

After hooking up with a third partner, Tim Miller, a web designer and passionate fly angler, they picked a storefront not far from Dan’s tattoo parlor in Hawley, Pa.  It may be the only fly shop in the world that also sells custom painted skateboards. 

As for the dark thoughts? Witman says that they’re largely at bay. “I really have recovered from a truly hopeless state. It’s largely due to the spiritual pursuit and fly fishing.”