Carter fished the green drake hatch on Pennsylvania’s Spruce Creek almost every year for 40 years.
The late President Jimmy Carter fly fishing on the Boulder River, south of Big Timber, Mont. (Jess Keller/Courtesy The Carter Center)
“President Carter wrote five feature articles for Fly Fisherman (magazine), mostly travelogues about fishing in Tierra del Fuego, the Ponoi River, or Honduras,” Ross Purnell, the publication’s editor, recalled recently. “He was kind, humble, and always enjoyed swapping fish stories. But for him it was never just about the fish. He enjoyed the camaraderie of fishing with his friends or with Rosalynn, and he often combined diplomatic or humanitarian work with his fishing travels. And he was a constant defender of the environment.”
For 14 years, Matt Ramsey of Eugene, Ore., was a fly fishing guide on the Eg River in Outer Mongolia, which is sandwiched between Russia and China, It’s one of the few places where taimen, the world’s largest salmonid — which includes salmon, char, whitefish, grayling and trout — can be caught.
The world record taimen taken on a fly was landed in the Tugur River in Russia and weighed 115 pounds, 8 ounces.
In 2013, accompanied by Secret Service agents and a few friends, and on the cusp of his 89th birthday, Carter and his wife stepped off a vintage Russian helicopter in Outer Mongolia to fish for taimen for a week. Ramsey would be their guide.
“Taimen are very aggressive predators, but they can be challenging to hook and catch on a fly,” Ramsey said Thursday by phone from his home. “One reason is that we throw big flies that can be difficult to handle in the wind.”
