One of our biggest groups to ever go fishing together made a pilgrimage to Montauk on Friday, November 9^th. Twelve FATC members left St Louis at 6am, despite the very cold day, to cheer on our first graduate from the 2018 Fall fly fishing class.

Bill Brown scheduled himself to graduate on the first day of catch and release season and picked a great day to fish. He had eleven other members cheering him on; Bill Byington, Mike Oldani, Paul Schneider, Bill Lowry, Miles Meyer, Glenn Haake, Sid Aslin, Tim Klotz, Don Varner, Kenny Klimes and one of our newest members, Russ Bacon.  The group couldn’t have picked a colder day so far this fall as the temperatures ranged from the high 20s to the mid-30s.  They even had a few snow flakes fall on them during the day.  But the fishing was good enough to warm them up enough to fish until the siren at 4pm.  We took up two picnic tables for lunch and we got a lot of looks from people trying to figure out who these “rowdy guys” were.

This was Bill’s graduation day and he caught fish right from the beginning of the day until the end. He did an awesome job and as a first-time fly fisher he got the techniques down without any trouble.  He had the chance to catch rainbow by stripping the fly, swinging the fly and dead drifting the fly – he saw it all. The rest of the eleven also had a good day fishing.  The top fly seemed to be the black woolybugger as most guys went to it early and with much success.  Other flies fished were nymphs, pheasant tail nymphs, midges, rubberlegged stoneflies, and son of san juan worms.  It seemed the darker colored flies did better.  The gang stayed mostly in the fly fishing only area although now the entire park is fly fishing only (no bait).  Most fish were in the 12-13 inch range with several nice fat 14 -15 inch rainbows netted.

At the end of the day we all packed up the cars and headed to Missouri Hicks BBQ for a celebratory fellowship dinner. We reserved a big table ahead of time and Theresa, our waitress, took great care of us. She even saved a full coconut cream pie for the group. Although some of us went with our favorite dessert of hot blackberry cobbler with ice cream.

Congratulations to Bill Brown on his graduation and a big welcome to Russ Bacon on his membership into the fellowship.