Please let me introduce myself.  My name is Don Ordes, and I reside in Casper, Wyoming.  I’m originally from New Orleans, where I grew up loving to hunt, fish, and trap. At the age of 10, I read an article in Field and Stream about fly tying. New Orleans was not a fly fishing town 40 years ago, so help, materials, and tools were impossible to come by for a 10-year-old. The article was about mayflies, and I was so intrigued that I grabbed my mom’s sewing scissors and some thread, robbed some feathers from my pillow, and without vice or tools, tried as hard as I could to imitate that fly on a small saltwater hook, tying with my bare hands. 

When I moved to Wyoming more than 25 years ago, fly tying took a back seat to family and kids and work, but it was brought front-and-center by neighbors and co-workers who wanted fishing flies. Now I was in trout country and flies had names and sizes and specific materials.  My fly tying was reborn in earnest. I quickly realized, however, that commercial fly tying was not my ‘bag’. But, I liked the stoneflies that I saw in Yellowstone and was intrigued by what a fly-fisherman there told me. He said that if someone could tie a very realistic imitation of the local stonefly, he would buy them and catch a zillion trout.  I went to work on realistics and found what would beome my niche in the world of fly tying.  The chain of events put into motion at that moment resulted in what 15 years ago became Fantasy Fly Co. and has led to what it has become today.