About Me

My grandfather, Lester Gellatly, hand built a log cabin on the shores of Lake Wenatchee in the late 1940’s, so as early in my life as I can remember, and probably back to when I can’t remember, I have been coming to Lake Wenatchee. This, by default, means I have been fishing a lot on Lake Wenatchee, Little Wenatchee river, White river, Wenatchee river, Nason creek, and many other waters around the area. Mind you this was back when there was not as tight of control on most of these waters and one could fish when and how they wanted to.

In my younger days and thru School I did lots of fishing in many places. During the 80’s I did commercial fishing in Alaska for a 10 year stint and in as much as it was an excellent experience and sometimes lucrative it took the fishing drive out of me. I mean…after catching close to ¾ million pounds of fish over 10 years how fun is it to catch one fish?

Time went on I helped raise a family and got into the woodworking business. Eventually buying a sawmill and setting up my 5,000 sq/ft shop for wood working. As this was going on I slowly got more interested in fishing and have taken it back up.

Then I met Dr. John Bush. He was buying Black Walnut from me for some fish nets he was making. He showed me a thing or two about making nets.

The two worlds, fishing and woodworking, collided in my head that day, with a bang, and I decided to dabble in making a fishnet for myself.

Well……. it is not as easy as one thinks it may be, even for experts in woodworking. Many processes go into making craftsman quality fishnets and that is all I was interested in making. Many attempts, many jigs and patterns, lots of fire wood, some nets good enough to give to family, but no brand on the handle. Then I learned a key factor. “repeatability”. My jigs and patterns all had to be able to repeat in order to properly laminate. That is when I went out and had custom Aluminum jigs made for me at Honeycutt Manfacturing. Bingo. That was the corner I needed to round. I have been making craftsman quality nets since then.

In all fairness I would not be making this quality of net if it was not for John Bush and Steve Honeycutt, Thank you both.