Vermont Fly Fishers Compete at Otter Creek Classic

The rod doesn’t move for a long time. Then it does, and everything else falls away.

That’s fly fishing in Vermont, at least according to the people who keep coming back for it. On Saturday and Sunday, anglers will gather along the Otter Creek and White River watersheds for the Otter Creek Classic, one of the few fly fishing competitions in the state, marking the official kickoff of Vermont’s open trout season.

Min Brown will almost certainly be there, thinking about the water before he ever steps in it.

“I usually pick one hobby and then get, like, very excessively into it,” Brown said. That’s an understatement. Brown has been fly fishing for roughly 18 years and guiding professionally for eight, fitting it around his day job at an aviation repair station. He’s also won the Classic three times in the past four years, a level of dominance that’s only been matched once in the competition’s nearly 20-year history. The other angler who pulled off a triple win? Jesse Haller, the Classic’s founder, who now works for Vermont-based gear company Orvis.

Last year, Brown’s score was more than double the runner-up’s. Fellow angler Joe Goodspeed, owner of Vermont-based Diamondback Fly Rods, put it bluntly in an Instagram comment after the results came in: “They say 10% of the anglers catch 90% of the fish. But I looked at the OCC results and ‘Min catches 90% of the fish’ would be a better description of the situation.”

It’s a ridiculous margin by any measure. More ridiculous when you consider the conditions.

The Classic runs in April, which means snowmelt, frigid water, and weather that shifts without warning. Steven Atocha, who helps organize the competition and runs a gear shop and guiding service in Middlebury that hosts the event, doesn’t sugarcoat it. “We have fished in snowstorms, you know, sunny days, you know, rain, just about everything you can imagine,” he said. The competition has been running since 2008, and it consistently draws Team USA anglers and seasoned locals who know these rivers well. Brown beats them anyway.

Vermont’s mountain streams aren’t forgiving. Atocha has been guiding since 1998 and still tells clients the same thing: it’s hard to catch fish here. The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department estimates roughly 47,000 Vermonters fish for trout and salmon each year, with another 15,000 traveling from out of state to try their luck. Most of them come knowing the odds aren’t great. They come for other reasons.

Catch and release fishing for trout is allowed year-round in nearly all of Vermont. But the start of open trout season, which this year’s Classic coincides with, means anglers can generally keep a portion of what they catch. That shift matters to some people more than others. For competitors like Brown, the keeping isn’t really the point.

For Upper Valley residents, the Classic is also a reminder of what sits practically in the backyard. The White River, which feeds into the Connecticut River near Hartford, Vermont, runs through some of the most fishable water in the region. Students at Dartmouth who’ve made it out to the DOC trailheads and the Moosilauke Lodge area know the terrain in a general sense. Fewer make the connection to what runs beneath it.

Reporting from VTDigger first surfaced the details on Brown’s streak and the Classic’s history earlier this week.

Spring in the Upper Valley tends to shake people loose from indoor habits. The ice goes out, the mud dries up a little, and suddenly the rivers look possible again. Fly fishers call it coming out of hibernation, which is either a metaphor or just an accurate description of what it feels like to stand in cold moving water for the first time in months.

Brown wouldn’t put it that poetically. He’d just say he’s been tying flies all winter, waiting.