“Fishing Western Maryland’s Savage River”

Matt O’Neal

October 16, 2024

Our speaker for October is PPTU member, YouTube fly tyer and educator extraordinaire Matt O’Neal (@SavageFlies). Matt will be sharing his expertise on fishing one of Maryland’s premiere trout streams the Savage River.

Matt grew up in the mountains of north Georgia. He attended college at The Citadel in South Carolina and then spent ten years as a Naval officer in Rhode Island, New York City, Norfolk, Monterey, Seattle and Washington, DC. He currently works for the Navy as the Public Affairs Officer of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, MD.

He began fly fishing in the 1980s with an old Cortland rod/reel combo from K-mart. Mostly targeting bass and panfish on the local farm ponds. He fished off and on for the next 20 years and after his stint in the Navy and moving back to Maryland, he picked it up for good and has been fishing as often as possible since about 2015.

In 2018 he and his wife bought a farm near Cumberland, MD. That it was near the Savage River was a happy coincidence! He considers the Savage his homewater and fishes it 20-30 times a year but spends plenty of time on the Gunpowder as well. He's lucky enough to get 2-3 fishing vacations a year where he'll make the trip down to the Great Smoky Mountains or the Catskills. His future plans are to keep creating fly tying videos for Savage Flies until he can retire to his farm and hopefully start writing fly tying books. We hope to see many of you for this interesting and informative presentation by our own Matt O’Neal.

– Scott Cernich

November’s Speaker: Monte Burke, author of Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon, MonteBurke.com