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Alright, I'm Flip Pallot, and old guy, I've been friends with Brian since the 90's, the
early 90's when he contacted me by fax and pleaded with me to take him fishing, begged
me. I tried to ignore him and wouldn't take his calls, but he kept calling and faxing
and it was, finally I said ok, we'll go fishing and we've been good friends ever since then.
We've done a lot of traveling together, a lot of fishing together. Learned some life
lessons together, at least I did. And I'm thrilled to be here today, this is the first
of what will be a long string of annual events, and I'm honored to be the first guest for
such a series of events, just happy to be here. This is, I'm just blown away at how
special a night this is. I think this has been such a success for all of us, that we're
going to make this a yearly banquet. And what a heart warming night this is and I just can't
say thanks enough for all that you people do for us at Mad River Outfitters so a round
of applause for you all. This guy is a hardcore fisherman, a hardcore gear junky, he's a hardcore
fly tier and again we love him to death. So it's my honor to present Angler of the Year
to Mike Bowman. Alright, so fly tier of the year, we're going to make this into a big
deal over the next year and people are going to have to work hard to get this next year.
But the choice this year was very obvious, so I think we all need to recognize Mike Schmidt
of Anglers Choice Flyers. Mike, come on up. So without further ado friends, I'd like to
hand you over to my friend, my mentor, a friend of Mad River Outfitters, and I think one of
the greatest this sport has ever seen and that's Mr. Flip Pallot. Who is this guy? I
was hoping for a nice introduction. I think one of the things that got me, or became one of the benefits of being in this industry,
of being a fly fisher was that it gave me the opportunity to travel to so many wonderful
destinations. The guides come to pick us up in the morning, Ed and I take out our meals
with these bright flourescent orange lines and the guides recoil like we had thrown acid
at them. They said you can't use these lines here. You had to use these dark brown or green
flies. After two days, Ed and I rebelled and put our orange lines back on and the next
day we go down to the river and the guides are horrified with this rebellion. But the
first fish that we saw, boom we caught it. We started catching these big trout and it
was amazing. We come to our last morning, we were about to leave and the guides come
around to say goodbye to us. So I said to them, I said John, what do you think of these
orange lines now? He looked at the orange line and he said, "You did alright, but think
how much better you would've done". The winner of the 10 weight mangrove fly rod, hopefully
going to chase some muskies, cuda, some big fish in the salt, is 361087. Ryan, a musky
fisherman. He did it! Good work man. Good job man.