Angler of the Year: Ted Leeson

A writer who captures the spirit of why we fly-fish.

Ted Leeson

When I first met Ted Leeson, in 1995 at the fly-fishing industry's annual trade show in Denver, I didn't know that over the coming years we would share many days of fishing and laughter from Oregon to Maine and lots of places in between. That we would become known in certain snarky circles as the "Tippet Brothers," and would perfect a relentless tag-team homage to our perpetual muses, Beavis and Butthead, that would annoy everyone but us. That he would write a tres-flattering foreword for my first book, Crosscurrents, and that without his encouragement and advice I probably wouldn't have written that book or any others. That Ted and his habitual co-conspirator Jim Schollmeyer would write the Fly Tier's Benchside Reference, a book so encyclopedic and accessible that almost everyone everywhere who wraps feathers around hooks would find it as indispensable as a vise or a bobbin. That the same team would produce The Benchside Introduction to Fly Tying, whose
 

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