Thanks to everyone who participated in our banquet this year. It was our first of what we expect to be an annual event and from all reports it was an overwhelming success. We made a weekend out of it at Rockwell Springs. We started with fishing the 3 miles of private stream on Saturday morning, which is stocked with Brook Trout, Brown Trout, Tiger Trout, and of course a healthy helping of Rainbows. 
 

The doors for the dinner opened at 5:30 and we had 50 attendees. There were silent auction items to bid on as well as several bag raffles. The items appeared to be a hit. Thank you to our many kind donors who donated the auction items and bag raffle items.

Dinner was served at 7:00 with a short talk afterwards by Chris Steffen from the Emerald Necklace Chapter. Chris is the Ohio TU State Council representative to the National Leadership Council of Trout Unlimited. Chris spoke about some of the recent activities on the national level and about the health of the Great Lakes, in particular Lake Erie and some of the challenges it currently faces.

After dinner we announced the bag raffle winners and distributed the auction items to the high bidders. Thanks to everyone for buying plenty of bag raffle tickets and bidding generously on the auction items. Overall, we managed to raise close to $3000 to help fund our activities for the upcoming year!

For those lucky enough to be able to spend the night at Rockwell, we picked back up with the fishing on Sunday and fished all day. It sounded like there was some pretty serious catching going on Sunday, with most people reporting that the fish were very willing participants. There were even a couple of Grand Slams reported (at least one fish caught of each species in the stream).

We are already starting to plan next year's event and hope it will be just as successful, if not more so. Our banquet next year will be back at Rockwell on Saturday, November 2!

A special thanks to all of the FTTU team who worked on the banquet and to Dean Weaver for taking some great pictures and allowing us to share them. Look for them on our website and our Facebook page.