Bill Jeans welcomed Mike Stevens to the meeting and introduced him by telling us that Mike clearly remembers the first fish he caught on a fly. It was in December 1971 when Mike was 14 years old, and it was caught on a Red Spinner from Tasmania’s Macquarie River. And Mike still has that fly.
In 2017, according to Bill, Mike told his wife Jules (who is also a highly skilled fly fisher, having represented Australia in international competitions) that they had a problem. Mike said to Jules: “We’ve got too much money! What are we going to do?” So they purchased the Essential Fly Fisher store in Launceston!
Mike has fished in many places worldwide, and his talk at our meeting was about a month spent in Montana (USA), where he fished every day in August of 2024. He also visited rivers in Idaho and Wyoming.
Here is Mike’s presentation:
The first thing you should do in fishing is find the right people to go fishing with. In this photo on the screen Peter Hayes is on the right, Nick Taransky is in the middle, and David Hemmings is on the left. And these blokes are lunatics, because they all fish with wooden rods.
They fished the whole month in Montana last year using only cane rods. Now I own a fly fishing shop, but I can’t fish with cane rods. But I did fish every day for the whole month of August with a nine foot, four weight Loomis Asquith, which I think is probably now the best fly rod in the world.
Yes, I had a month in Montana last year. We arrived on the first of August and left on the 31st of August. This photo is of the Henry’s Fork, one of the most famous trout rivers in the world. We flew from Australia to San Francisco – about a 14 or 15 hour flight, and I confess I do not like flying. On arrival we stayed in Ennis in Montana, a town of about 1,000 people which also had four fly fishing shops despite its small population. One chap there owns two shops and employs 30 guides.
So Ennis is tiny, but it’s absolutely fantastic. Everyone knows everyone. One of the good things about Ennis is that it has got a 25 mile an hour speed limit, so everyone slows down. And if you even look like you’re about to step onto the street all the traffic stops.
Ennis is reasonably close to the Yellowstone River, and we fished there quite a lot, and in Idaho and Wyoming as well. We rented a house there for a month, and there were deer and moose dodging around the grounds. The Madison River was also close by, and this river is everything to places around Montana. We just walked a short distance across the grass to go fishing.
Each morning we walked to a place called the Shaw Shot Cafe, where they did fantastic egg and bacon rolls and coffee. On about our fifth day we were sitting in this cafe, and Dulce came over and said: “Right, what are you blokes here for? How long are you staying, and where are you staying?” She continued, “I run the hairdressing place here and Jenny there is the real estate agent. If you need anything, just come and see us.” So we told her where we were from, and she replied, “I know you’re from Australia. We can tell by your accents.”
They were beaut, and were just looking after their town. So that’s the way it was, and it was a fantastic place.
The guy here in this photo is Bruce Richards, who had a lot to do with the development and production of Scientific Angler fly fishing lines. He’s retired now, having worked at Scientific Anglers for 30 years.
This guy is Keith Brauneis, who is the CEO of the Madison River Foundation. They look after angling access and the angling rights to the river. So in Ennis, and maybe other places, you go to the supermarket and buy something for say $12.50, and they say: “Would you like to round up for the river?” So instead of $12.50 you pay $13 and the Foundation gets the 50 cents. And everyone in the supermarket knows how important the river is, so Keith Brauneis looks after that.
The people there all tell you to beware of the moose, as they’re dangerous and they’re big, and they’ll charge you. Well, these guys (in the photo here) were living on our back lawn. They’d come across the river, and we didn’t know we were supposed to be frightened of them.
This is Ennis. And, you know, we had a lot of fun there in the town. Everyone there does everything. So these three dudes in the photo all work in the fly shop, and the fishing guides also work in the bar. On the Madison, and on all those other places there, everything is about the food for the trout. There are huge hatches, and they start and stop at different times in different months.
We were probably a bit late for the river fishing, but it didn’t seem to matter. If you go into a fly shop there’s a million different flies for sale, but we didn’t much use any of them. We just used our flies from home.
This is day one. Nick Taransky is fishing the river just below where we were, and he caught five or six fish on the first day. We had hired a Chev suburban something or other, a huge eight-seater, which had plenty of room for us.
One of the interesting things that we did over there was to go to a place called Camp Fire. We went there for breakfast and this bloke was cooking breakfast, and we saw this material about the Stimulator fly. His name is Jim Slattery, and he invented this fly, or so he claims. Anyway, we did an interview with him, which I recorded but it’s too long to play tonight. But he was really dirty because while everyone copies his fly, he’s never received any money for it.
He was in a band called The Stimulators, and he thought that would be a great name for a fly. Now everyone’s used a Stimulator at some stage, and we had just met the dude who had invented it, and he gave us all sorts of details. This photo shows his little cafe with the Madison River running right outside the cafe.
The Gallatin River is a tributary of the Missouri River, and it was the first place that we fished. We got there early in the morning and the water was really cold, so there were no hatches, and nothing was happening. Our feet were freezing walking up the river. Then maybe two hours later it really took off, and we caught some 30 or 40 fish. We just walked off the side of the road into the river, then walked three or four kilometres up the river, then got out and walked back down the road – and didn’t see another person.
Below Ennis on the Madison is Ennis Lake, and no one fishes it, yet it is the most extraordinary place with hatches like you wouldn’t believe. But over there they just don’t fish the lakes very much. They’re river fishermen. They get in a drift boat and drift down the river chucking big bobbers sideways.
Now Randall Trethewie , our friend from Tasmania, has got a drift boat there. So we all got into his drift boat, all five of us, and the hatches there were just extraordinary. Can you catch the fish? Not really, but it was great fun. Then a guy at the boat ramp comes over and says, “Where are you blokes from – Australia? Oh, then you’ll need some of these flies.” So day one he brings down a few flies. For day two he goes back home and ties a whole bunch more and gives them to us, and then invites us for a barbecue. And was all pretty cool!
This photo is of Ennis Lake and is pretty typical of the conditions. Early in the day there’s just no wind, and it continues like that sometimes till 11 or 12 o’clock. And then you get a little bit of breeze. You are fishing to fish that you can see, and fish are everywhere. These conditions are very exciting, but the fish are really difficult to catch. This photo is of Randall’s drift boat. He’s got one there, and he’s got another one back in Tasmania. I’ve just bought one in Tasmania, but haven’t told my wife yet. But then she might never need to know?
Here is another lake further upstream called Hebgen, and a guy called Shelby Jarrell lives there. Shelby comes to Tasmania quite a lot, and he’s got a daughter who lives in South Australia. He has some boats, so he loaned us a couple. Hebgen is an extraordinary fishery too, equally as difficult as the others. You can fish to rising fish for four or five hours and maybe catch none, or maybe one, or two.
Someone tonight asked about Chuck Rivera. There are a few people in this room who know Chuck. He’s been to Tasmania, has guided in New Zealand, and he lives on Hebgen Lake (which is West Yellowstone). And he’s one of the grumpiest people you would ever meet, especially grumpy if he’s not playing golf.
Here is a photo of Indian Creek, which we fished quite a few times. One of the really important things was when Peter Hayes told us we should have really long leaders to get long drag free drifts.
These long leaders were particularly good on those cane rods. In this movie you can see how the angler is mending line a lot. He’s trying to get his fly in that little bit of still water there at the top of the run. There’s a fish in there, and he’d seen the dry fly three or four times.
We mostly only fished with dry flies. The fish were not very big – just 8 to 12 inches. We walked just two kilometres to get to the river, and I think we saw just three other people there during the entire trip.
We caught nice little fish like this rainbow. Now I’ve never really been a fan of rainbow trout, but when you’re in rainbow trout water and these are the native fish, it does take on a significant difference. We fished pools like this. There was plenty of deep water along there, and you know where you want to cast your fly in these pools. Drifting dry flies down and seeing fish come up and take them was just heaven.
One of the other places we fished with Randall was Wade Lake. No-one else was fishing it as they’re all down fishing on the Madison. This is an absolutely crystal clear lake. It doesn’t have a river running into it, so it’s all spring fed. It’s about 12 to 15 feet deep there, and you could see the bottom really clearly. It was just the most beautiful, pristine water.
We also fished this place called Poindexter Slough, and it was really difficult fishing. We only caught one fish in the day. David Hemmings caught it, and it was quite a large fish. He sat on the bank for three quarters of an hour giving me instructions on what he was doing wrong, but eventually he caught this fish. Then we went to Winston Fly Rods, and then to Virginia City.
You know, everyone who goes to Yellowstone goes and sees Old Faithful. It erupts every 45 minutes or so, which must just be a godsend for the tourism industry. We also fished in Yellowstone Lake, and this is David fishing off the shore there. It’s at 7,000 feet. We fished for about 20 minutes or so, then walked up the bank there. I climbed to the top and couldn’t hardly breathe. You’re running out of oxygen at 7,000 feet.
Now Henry’s Fork, which runs into the Snake River, is one of the greatest fisheries in the world, especially as a dry fly fishery. And there’s just miles and miles and miles of it. So it comes out of the water at a place called Big Springs. It looks like just a hole in the ground with a bit of water coming out, but 550 million litres of water come out of that hole in the ground every day. There’s a little bridge there, and you stand on it you can see rainbow trout in there of 10, or 12, or even 15 pounds.
This photo is of Henry’s Fork at Harriman Ranch. It may be 400 metres wide here, and it flows like this for miles and miles and miles. And it is thigh deep and wadable. No worries, no deep holes, so you can just cross back over just anywhere you want. It is the most extraordinary place. It’s got miles and miles of this thigh deep water. You can wade all the way across, then all the way back. And there are huge hatches there. The best hatches are in July and we were there in August. But the real advantage of being there late is that there were no people there. So we walked miles and miles of this, and maybe saw just four or five other people. It was quite extraordinary.
Occasionally a drift boat would come along. I was quite lucky to catch two good rainbows there. I think I was there for three days, and I caught maybe four fish, two of which were decent-sized rainbows. As I said earlier, I don’t really rate rainbows all that highly, but when you’re catching them in their native environment on a dry fly in a place that’s really difficult to catch them in, it’s pretty cool.
In West Yellowstone there’s an old dude who has had a tackle store there for many years. He’s 80 years old. His name is Bob Jacklin, and right in the middle of West Yellowstone there’s a casting pool there called the Bob Jacklin pool. We knew Simon Gawesworth was going to be in West Yellowstone at one of the angler shops, so we organized a hook up with him. It ended in a casting competition, of course, using those cane rods. Eventually Simon had a cast with my Asquith, and he thought it was very good.
I said, “You’d never see this anywhere in Australia”, and someone said: “What about the Red Tag pool?” Okay, not in Tasmania then. And Bob Jacklin at 83 years of age was still teaching people how to cast at that pool when we were there. This is a photo of Simon Gawesworth, and as an advocate for fly fishing there’s no better person in the world. And if you’ve ever heard him talk about fly lines he will keep you enraptured for hours just talking about fly life.
Simon is the most fantastic person. He’s still with Rio though he’s moved back to Scotland, and still does a few trips with them, travelling around the world. And the interesting thing to me is that he’s a great advocate for Sage, which is Sage Rio Redington, but he’ll have a cast with any rod. He just wants to broaden his whole experience and understanding of things fly fishing.
I’ve got a video here of my Loomis Asquith rod being cast. The bloke is Matt Klara who owns Big Sky anglers in West Yellowstone, which is a bit bigger than Ennis, and has five or six fly fishing shops. And they are all great shops.
They decided they were going to have a distance casting competition. Now I’ve been fishing this Loomis Asquith rod for the whole time and I can cast about 80 feet with it, with a lot of effort. These guys were casting 120 to 130 feet with it, and in the end they all decided that it was a draw because it had just thin backing line on it.
We went off to fish the Madison, and we were in Yellowstone National Park, and you need to buy a license to fish Yellowstone. But Yellowstone is in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, so you just buy a license to fish Yellowstone.
So we’ve got our licenses and we go to Yellowstone. No one’s fishing in the car park, so we jump in the river. The road is right next to it. People are going past, yelling out of their cars and honking their horns and waving at us. And I think aren’t they friendly? Isn’t that cool? This is so exciting.
And then Officer Kleiner comes along and says: “Get out of the river! Get out of the river!” I thought he just wanted to check our licenses. Then he yells: “The river’s closed! Ground your rods! Ground your rods!!” What’s that mean I wonder? Anyway, he’s telling us to put our rods on the ground. “Don’t touch them!” We put our rods on the ground, and I think: “Oh dear – I think we’re in trouble.”
Officer Kleiner says: “Don’t you realize the river’s closed?” I said, “Well our mate in the tackle store said it was open.” “What tackle store!!” I replied, “I can’t remember what it was called.” David Hemmings points to my hat and says: ”It’s that one! He bought a hat there.” Officer Kleiner says, “Well, we haven’t got reception here, so we can’t ring them.” Anyhow, he’s getting really cranky, and he’s got this mate there we called Coke Bottle, because he’s got these big coke bottle glasses. Coke Bottle’s got his pad out and he’s writing on his pad. Then about five minutes in he puts his pad back in his pocket and he doesn’t get another pad out, so I think we’re safe, as they confiscate everything and they fine you, and you end up in court. It’s a real mess there if you’re caught doing something wrong.
I said to Officer Kleiner: “Do you fish?” He said, “Why do you think I’ve got this job?” I said, “Okay, so where should we be fishing?” He said, “Well, you should be going to the Gibbons. That’s open. And you need to drive 40 minutes up there. It’s really good.” I said, “Well, is that what we should do?” And he said, “Yes, you should! You should do it right now.” So he let us off.
When we got back into town talking to the tackle store owner, he said, “Gosh, you’re lucky. They don’t ever let anyone off.” I think that because we were from Australia it was probably a little bit complex. Over there most people into fly fishing think that fly fishing is sitting in a boat with a bobber. If you’re even 400 metres away from where they’re floating down the river, you can see their bobbers. They’re huge things with a nymph hanging underneath it, and they just drifting downstream. If you’re anywhere near the river you can see four or five drift boats at the same time, all going down the river. And they all catch fish.
This photo is a 30 mile riffle. So from the bottom of Quake Lake up to Ennis is 30 miles and it’s all exactly the same water. It just goes down there like this, and there’s boats on it everywhere. This photo is a guy I was talking about earlier from the Madison River Foundation with Nick Taransky and Randall.
This is Keith and Wendy Brauneis, who we were talking about earlier from the Madison River Foundation. They invited us around for some antelope stew. Earlier tonight I was talking about John Lanchester, who died while we were in Montana, and he was a great mentor to Peter Hayes. I said, “Well, why don’t we tie a Tom Jones and on the day of his memorial service we’ll fish this fly.” So we all tied some dries and then we stood in Indian Creek in one pool, and we caught 15 fish in one run, and all on these Tom Jones variants.
This is a photo of Peter Hayes and Nick Taransky crossing the Madison. It is pretty much the same depth all the way across. It is running fast, and is it a low level, and they’re on Struggle Street, trying to get across there. There’s so much of this water, and when I was talking about that 30 mile riffle, it’s just like that for 30 miles. It is the most extraordinary river. And I think there’s 5,000 fish per kilometre.
This photo is of the same spot. Nick Taransky missed that fish, but I had a rod a bit longer, so I’m casting just over the current into the backwater using a 25 foot leader. Peter Hayes was on the camera, but he missed the take. I’m trying to net the fish, but I’m not very good at netting fish. This is on the last day we were fishing. We were going to try to catch this fish at Indian Creek and you’ll see me eventually net it.
So there’s quite a few lessons here, and one of them is the long leader thing so you’ve got this really long drag free drift. And Peter was absolutely the best at demonstrating it, so he could land it behind a rock in some really fast water on the Madison, and the fly would just sit there, and every so often the fish would come up and eat it, whereas if you were fishing a 12 or 15 foot leader, there’s no way you could get the necessary drag free drift for as long as we could. So that was important.
The other really important thing is to pick your friends. Don’t go away with people you don’t know because it’s not going to end well at some stage. If you go away to a place like this then you spend a lot of money getting there, so stay as long as you possibly can. You get to meet more people, and they’ll tell you the places to go. They know you’re probably not coming back, so they’ll tell you more things than they’ll ever tell the locals.
Don’t be cheap. If you need to spend some money to do something, remember you’re never going to get back there. Maybe it’s cost you $4,000 just to get there, so spend the money while you’re there. Don’t wait till you retire, because it’s too late to do anything much by that stage. Talk to locals like the real estate agent and the hairdresser and people like that. They will tell you all sorts of things. Go to the sports stores and spend money. If someone suggests you do something, then do it
So embrace the whole thing, and have some fun while you’re there. Luck is a really important thing when you’re away. I was sitting in the airport on the way back and I’d put in a request for an upgrade using points. And my phone dinged, and I got put in business class for the trip home where I could stretch out completely and go to sleep. So I was really lucky at the end of the trip, for someone who really hates flying, to get an upgrade. If you can afford to do that, well, you know, it’s fantastic.
Thank you all for your time.