How it all started

15 years ago I took a business trip to Montana, I was going to be traveling through a good part of the state east to west. As a long time avid fisherman I had recently caught the fly fishing bug on a trip to Sun Valley Idaho so the idea of nearly a week in Montana, new country to me, was pretty inviting. My trip called for me to be in Billings for work on Monday morning so I chose to save the company a good deal of money by flying out on Saturday evening to take advantage of the cheaper airfares and located a guide to take me down the Big Horn River on Sunday.

My guide was a great older gentleman who had moved from Nebraska to Montana for the specific purpose of helping the Montana DNR build a tail race fishery below the dam on the Big Horn, great coincidence! He had a 1930's generation mahogany drift boat that was the envoy of every Hyde and ClackaCraft owner we saw on the river that day. Drifting the Big Horn that day, catching several nice browns and rainbows really cemented my new found love for fly fishing and I'll never forget my drift boat trip, what a great way to fish but not many places to use one when you live in Omaha as I did at the time.

Moving to Minnesota in 2000 changed my fishing opportunities greatly and over the past several years I've had some of my best fishing adventures fishing from a canoe or more recently a kayak on the Mississippi, St Croix, Canon and Zumbro Rivers. The Mississippi and St Croix are my favorites and are perfect for a drift boat approach. That in combination with an article I accidentally found on the web about Paul Butler's stitch and glue plywood drift boat, the Mini Mac, started fueling my desire to build a drift boat. So here I am today getting ready to start the project this weekend. The attached photo is a completed version of the boat I'm starting, if it comes out half this nice I'll be very happy with it. The plans come from Montana Riverboats, it's the beaver tail model and is 15 feet long with a 66" beam, should comfortably fish 3 people, I expect those extra 2 seats to be in high demand so get your requests in early (LOL).