Who is the Finest Fishing Guide Who Ever Lived? With Monte Burke
The Orvis Fly-Fishing Podcast
James Hathaway
4.8 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2025
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest this week is one of fly fishing's best writers and storytellers Monte Burke [31:35], whose writing you may have seen in Garden & Gun, Forbes, or The Drake—or perhaps you've read his book, and one of my favorite fishing books, Lords of the Fly. To discover who Monte, and many other people (including me) consider the finest fly-fishing guide who ever lived, you'll have to listen to the podcast. You'll also learn about his new book of stories, Rivers Always Reach the Sea.
In the Fly Box this week, we have some questions that I think will help many other fly fishers solve problems they may have, including:
A listener informs us about the different grain weights in standard fly lines, and how there is a much bigger percentage difference in lighter lines than heavier ones.
What do you think about hooks that get left in a fish's mouth?
What would you look for in an ideal brook trout spot?
How can I keep panfish from grabbing my carp flies?
Is there an advantage to silicone fly boxes over ones with foam strips?
If I practice casting with my 4-weight fiberglass rod, will that affect my casting on other rods?
How do you use a dubbing loop and when do you use one?
The solid metal eyes on my redfish flies sink too quickly. Should I use bead chain or plastic eyes instead?
What is it about CDL feathers that make it worth using?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing podcast. |
| 0:13.7 | This is your host, Tom Rosenbauer. |
| 0:15.2 | And my guest this week is my good friend Monty Burke. |
| 0:18.8 | Monty Burke is, in my opinion, one of the finest fly fishing |
| 0:24.0 | writers out there. He writes about other stuff too. But Monty is going to tell us a story. |
| 0:30.7 | He's a great storyteller. And it's going to tell us a story about the greatest fly fishing guide ever. This is in many people's opinion, |
| 0:42.1 | the greatest fly fishing guide who ever lived. And I'm not going to tell you who it is. |
| 0:47.7 | You're going to have to listen to the podcast to find out who it is. But it's a great story. |
| 0:52.2 | It's a fun story. And I hope you enjoy the podcast. |
| 0:56.8 | And before we do the flybox, just a couple announcements. My trip to Tecalaj in Argentina in late |
| 1:05.0 | January is sold out. I do have one spot for an angler available on my Spain trip in late September, |
| 1:16.8 | fishing for brown trout in Spain with great food and wine with salvalinus. And then I also have a |
| 1:27.2 | spot left in my trip next March, March of 2026 at Magic |
| 1:33.8 | Waters in Chile. And there also will be a second week tacked onto that at a place that I can't tell you about right now because we're still |
| 1:47.5 | finalizing the details and the price but it will be announced it will be announced |
| 1:54.0 | pretty soon so if you want to spend two weeks with me in Chile you can tack on an |
| 2:00.5 | extra week. |
| 2:02.3 | We have a lot of fun of my hosted trips, and I really enjoy meeting podcast listeners |
| 2:08.8 | and fellow flyfishers, and we always have lots of laughs and good food and great fishing. |
| 2:14.2 | So I hope you can join me on one of those trips. |
| 2:19.5 | And, of course, if you can't join me, |
| 2:27.5 | we have, Orvis has lots of endorsed operations around North America and around the world. |
... |
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