About Us

My father was a fly-fisherman. With his help, I caught my first trout: a seven inch golden, on a McGinty. We were 9,000 feet up, standing in a snow bank at the edge of a pocket lake that drained into the headwaters of the San Joaquin River. I remember shivering; perhaps with excitement but also with the coolness of a crisp May morning. It was 1938, the beginning of my love affair with trout.

Eight years later, my entrepreneurial father moved our family to a mining claim on a tributary f the pristine Smith River on northern California. Our family built and operated the rainbow trout hatchery and farm known as “Trout Haven”. My teen years were spent either working with trout or fishing for them on the Smith and its feeder streams.

Fishing as often as time and resources allowed, the years passed more quickly than I could have imagined. My rapture with trout continued. In 1975 I met a fellow fly fisherman who was renowned as a fly tyer extraordinaire. Dissatisfied with his tying equipment, he said, “Ron, why don’t you build a good vise? One that will hold a hook!” IN 1981 I presented him with my first production vise. That was the beginning of Dyna-King, and that fisherman and fly tyer was Grant F. King.