BY CHRIS GRADDY
SUN STAFF WRITER
JONESBORO — For 15 years, Steve DALLY’s job was reporting the latest news in local government. Now he is in the business of making dreams a reality.
DALLY was the featured speaker at the Northeast Arkansas Fly Fishers (NEAFF) summer banquet on Saturday night. He shared his knowledge of fly tying with club members at the Forrest L. Wood Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center earlier in the afternoon.
DALLY was born and raised on the island of Tasmania, a state of Australia. Now he spends his days working at the Mountain River Fly Shop in Cotter, giving guided fly fishing tours on the White River.
“I sat in an office cubicle for years dreaming about fly fishing and I know what it is like,” DALLY said. “So we try to give people that trout fisherman lifestyle for the time that they come visit us.”
DALLY was a late bloomer on the fly-fishing scene, not casting his first rod until his early 20s. It took just one trip for him to quickly become a fan of the sport.
“Tasmania was the first place in the southern hemisphere where trout fishing was introduced,” he said. “Basically my best friend took me fly fishing one day and I had sworn for years that I would never go do it because it was an old person’s game, but it was love at first cast and here I am.”
For years fly fishing was simply DALLY’s hobby. He spent years in journalism, covering local government and politics. He moved to the United States in December, 2000.
For his first three years in the country, DALLY worked as a traveling writer for a fly fishing magazine that took him to Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, New York, Michigan, New Mexico, Idaho and Arkansas.
After his trip to Arkansas, he decided to settle down. He took a job in Bentonville at a fly shop before moving to Cotter.
“I guided in the Eureka Springs area for about three years and then last year I moved to the Mountain River Fly Shop in Cotter,” he said. “We are one of the biggest fly shops in the Midwest and it’s a place where people come to share stories and hang out.”
DALLY said that out of all of the places he has been, including Tasmania, Arkansas has some of the best fishing he has ever seen.
“The fishing in Arkansas is second to none,” he said. “Every new place that you go to fish has something to offer, but if you come for size or numbers, Arkansas is one of the best. Only Alaska can compare in the United States.
“That is not saying that places like Montana or others are bad, but we have little special things here in Arkansas.”
NEAFF members look forward each summer to the chance to meet a special guest.
“Every year we have a summer speaker banquet and we will have someone come in who is well known or is different and have them do a program,” club treasurer Dennis Reed said.
The club started a little over 20 years ago and has grown in numbers. Currently the club has around 50 members.
Reed said the club has held a summer banquet for about five years, welcoming some big names in the outdoors.
“We have had Steve ‘Wildman’ Wilson, Ian James and the fly tying nun Sister Carole Anne Corley and several others since then come talk to us,” Reed said. “Sometimes we will have members go off to fish somewhere and then we will ask them to speak about their experiences. For example, over spring break we had several members go to Belize and we made them present a program on fishing in Belize.”
For DALLY, making his way to Jonesboro was an adventure.
“It is an adventure for me every day,” he said. “Even coming to Jonesboro was an adventure because I had never been this way. My wife used to live out this way and to her it wasn’t new, but to me it was, coming down out of the Ozarks and seeing flat land again.
“A lot of people take fly fishing very seriously and become obsessed with it. I will admit I am obsessed, but I also treat it with the silliness it deserves because it is grown men and women playing around and being kids again. That is what this all about, having fun.”

sports@jonesborosun.com