Tyer's Table with Anders and Eli

In this write-up, I will be summarizing the story of how I became friends with Elijah and how we started fishing together. What could be twenty pages long, I will do my best to explain in two paragraphs or less. Elijah and I first met in 6th grade at a summer camp our church used to host. We came from neighboring middle schools, so we really didn't start becoming good friends until our freshman years at West Linn High School. When we weren't partying or chasing girls, you could find us rigging up gear rods using night crawlers and swim jigs to bass fish on both the Tualatin and Willamette rivers. It wasn't until we moved to Bozeman in 2019 that we were introduced to the art of fly fishing. Aside from going to school and being construction laborers in the summertime, Elijah and I tried to get out and go trout fishing as much as we possibly could. We both thought it was so much fun, and it was super rewarding to push each other and see us both grow as anglers. Little did we know that fly fishing was not just some hobby or a great way to pass the time. For us, it was everything, and we quickly realized that it gave us purpose in life. It has become our passion.

In the spring of 2024, we both moved back to Oregon and decided to look into the guiding opportunities in Alaska to further develop our angling skills and careers. In the process of looking for guide jobs, in our free time, we would set out on adventures (close and far) looking for steelhead with our dear friend Isacc Sebastion. Isacc is a very talented angler who helped Elijah and me learn the fundamentals of Spey fishing and what it really means to swing a fly. He also motivated Elijah and me to invest in some fly-tying equipment and start producing creations of our own. He believed that the more we asserted ourselves in the world of Spey fishing, both on and off the water, the quicker we would learn and start to pick it up. With that being said, the three of us would get together a couple of nights a week and start tying together. We would laugh, sing, and drink lots of beer. However, we would also give each other constructive criticism and exchange ideas of different fly patterns we could see working in the future. Thanks to Isacc, Elijah and I picked up the whole fly-tying thing faster than expected and started doing it on our own time. Now, we are looking forward to sharing some of our favorite patterns at Royal Treatment!

Join us this Saturday, April 12th, at 10:30 AM, as Anders Martenson and Elijah Haak team up at the Tyer's Table.