Fun, Food, Fellowship and Fundraising!

Our annual FATC charity dinner was, again, another success! This is our eighteenth year as a fellowship and each year our charity dinner grows bigger and bigger. This year we had 140, men AND women, sign up for this special event.

Let’s start with a few details. Our charity dinner this year was on March 10^th, 2025, at Andre’s West banquet hall. Ander’s did another fantastic job of catering our dinner with outstanding food, an open bar, and perfect venue. We had 23 raffle gifts provided by our sponsors and members, many dinner gift cards, and more for all our attendees to win. This is all for our four charities, Casting for Recovery (breast cancer), Project Healing Waters (injured military), The Mayfly Project (mentoring foster children), and Altar Fly Fishing (life changing retreats). We have estimated that we took in over $26,000 for our charities counting raffle income, donations and corporate sponsor donations. We will let you know of the final numbers when we get them.

But first, I would be amiss not to thank all those that volunteered to help with putting on our charity dinner this year. Thanks to our Board of Directors, the members that went out to bring in raffle and gift items, our sponsors, and those that volunteered to work during the dinner. We can’t forget a big thanks to Pete Drochelman for putting together this year’s “2024 year in review” video. We will get it on the website soon for those that weren’t able to attend to watch it.

This year’s dinner agenda included roses for all the lovely ladies that attended. Everyone found with their nametags a free $25 raffle ticket for them to use towards our raffle items. Kenny Klimes was this year’s Master of Ceremonies and started the evening with introductions of guests and sponsors. We even showed videos from our four charities to give all our members an insight on what each charity does and stands for. Derrik Kassebaum said grace before we settled in and enjoyed our three-course meal. Which was awesome from the reviews!

This year’s FATC award recipients were Sterling Short (The Bob Chott Servant’s Heart award), Glenn Haake (The Lew Smith Spirit of Fly-Fishing award) and Pete Drochelman (The Chairman’s award). The Chairman’s “Going Above and Beyond” award is not given out every year and Pete was very deserving from all his work within the FATC. Congratulations to all the 2024 award winners.

Once dinner was over our members had the opportunity to buy their raffle tickets and check out the many prizes that they could try to win. This year we did something a little different as we allowed members to buy their raffle tickets early. The rest of the evening was filled with games and fellowship. As we did last year, to get in on any of the games you had to pay to play. For $10 you could play each of the games, but for your $10 you also received a beautiful leather luggage tag with the FATC logo embossed on it. Note: we still have many luggage tags for sale for those that didn’t get a chance to attend the dinner. Check out the pictures below for the raffle winners and game winners. One game was for just the ladies only and it looked like they had a fun time. The BIG raffle winners for the evening were Derrik Kassebaum and Sterling Short (I do know that they bought A LOT of tickets!!!).

It was a great time of fellowship. New friendships were made and old ones rekindled. If you missed it, make it a priority to attend next year’s charity dinner. To all those that attended – THANK YOU!