Reel adventures
Anglers travel the globe for big fish and camaraderie

By Ruth A. Hill
for Virginia Business
August 2006

Neal Rose needed bigger scales. He’d hooked a taimen on the Er River in Mongolia that he and his fishing partners knew to be in the 40-pound range. If they could certify the weight, the catch would be a world record on the fly tackle Rose was using. “But I only took 30-pound scales. I thought that would be sufficient,” Rose says with a laugh.

All was not lost. Rose, a Richmond veterinarian, made the record book another way — by landing a 12-pound taimen on an extremely light line. The world’s largest salmonid, taimen can grow to 75 inches and are prized for their explosive, rod-bending hits on flies.

Big fish, lots of fish, exotic fish, exotic locales — those heady incentives give fishing aficionados plenty of reasons to travel the globe. And Fly Fish the World in Richmond accommodates their passions with trips to Mongolia, Patagonia, the Amazon, Labrador, Alaska, Costa Rica, Tierra del Fuego and other spots off the beaten path.

Harry Robertson, who owns Hanover Fly Fishers, began building a clientele of adventurous anglers decades ago. He partnered with Robert Thomas and Alex Penland when Fly Fish the World was formed four years ago. The Richmond business offers instruction, gear and garb as well as arrangements with guides to familiar Virginia destinations.

Robertson stretches that envelope, whether he’s booking a corporate group to the Bahamas to cast for bonefish or helping a businessman get away from business as usual by taking him to some exotic spot.

Franz Mayr, manager of the Commonwealth Club in Richmond and a regular on Robertson’s trips, is one of the latter. “The camaraderie, the traveling and going out there and having a good time — that’s most important to me,” Mayr said. “Some other guys, if they don’t catch a hundred fish a day, it’s no fun. To me, it’s not the most important thing to catch a fish.”

That’s not to say he wasn’t excited when he caught a 19½-pound peacock bass with an 8-weight fly rod on the Tapera River in the Amazon rainforest two years ago. The beauty of the fish, with its peacock colors and markings, the bounty of the river, living on huge tented johnboats, getting to know the natives and even the nuisances — such as the croc-like caimen lurking just at the edge of comfort — made for rich memories.

Rich memories don’t come cheap, though. Most trips fall in a range from $2,000 to $4,000 for the land package — “totally inclusive once you get there,” Robertson says.

Part of the appeal is the same as with most fishing trips — coming back with great stories. Bill Boinest, the retired president and CEO of Craigie Inc., a Richmond investment company, has tales from six trips to Tierra del Fuego, the “land of fire” at the southern tip of South America. One involves a gull flying into and tangling his line while he was fighting a sea-run brown trout in the Rio Grande. “We landed the fish, which was 22 pounds, and that’s the largest I’ve caught,” Boinest says.

Like Mayr, Boinest prizes the camaraderie more than the big fish. “The guides and the people are wonderful,” Boinest says. “I’ve got some lifelong friends down there that I fish with, and I have a great time with them.
“ It’s hard to get there — it’s a very long trip — but it’s worth every bit of it.”