I grew up in a small mill town (Corinth, NY) in the Adirondack Mountains on the upper Hudson River. It is the beginning section of the river, where you can still swim in it to this day without affecting your skin or health, located midway between Lake George and Saratoga.
My father’s family farm sets in an even smaller town in the High Peaks Region of the Adirondack Mountain just outside of Lake Placid, NY. Keene, NY is located right on the banks of the East Branch of the Ausable River. Hulls Falls Road runs along the river in a truly impressive gorge section of the river with a massive falls at the head of it. My father’s family settled the area. Old Eli Hull was granted a 128-acre farm on the river for his service in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. He named the falls in his honor.
I grew up in a family of fly fishers. At the age of ten, I was casting a fly rod. My grandfather guided the famous and wealthy from NY City during the depression years of 1930’s on the Ausable River in Keene, NY. In its heyday Keene had five of the large Adirondack Hotels where the women and children from the City would spend the summers. The men would join them for weekends. I remember his stories of making $.50 a day guiding and how much money that was for the time.
For a number of decades of my youth, I pretty much considered the East Branch my personal trout stream. I would spend the summers of my early youth on the farm with my grandparents carrying stream water and cutting firewood. Many an afternoon was spent on the stream with a very cheap production bamboo fly rod in my hand. Today, thanks to modern trout management and environmental deterioration, the East Branch is vaguely a shadow of its former self.
TroutGetter Flies was started in 2003 after I retired from Three Mile Island. I retired in 2000 after 40 years in 3 different major industrial companies. I spent a couple of years traveling the Rockies with a much more expensive graphite fly rod and tried my hand at the financial world. I liked the Rockies. Couldn’t stand the financial world. I was either destined or doomed to become what I am doing and loving today.
Craig is the President and sole owner of TroutGetter Flies, LLC. Craig and his wife operate the company together. He is a demonstration Fly Tyer doing numerous tying seminars and sporting shows on the east coast.
I consider TroutGetter Flies the blue-collar man’s fly fishing company. I have been in business for twelve years and have yet to raise my prices. I often teach for free, but don’t often advertise that, and advocate using inexpensive but good quality equipment.
