While in Wyoming, the queen visited Ritz Sporting Goods in downtown Sheridan where the owner, Sam Mavrakis, presented her with a fishing rod and flies to give to her husband Prince Philip.
Mavrakis and Prince Philip got to know each other in 1969 when the prince first came out to Wyoming for a five-day hunting and fishing trip.
Mavrakis tied some flies for the prince and then took them out to the ranch.
“I went out to the Wallop ranch to deliver them. Well, Prince Philip was just a regular guy. One hell of a regular guy,” Mavrakis told the Washington Post.
Fishing ran and probably still runs in the British Royal Family – the late Queen’s mother (“The Queen Mother”) was a great salmon-fisher, so too her son, the new King Charles III, who not only fished “their bit” of water on the famed Scottish River Dee (and other Scots rivers) for salmon but also regularly in Iceland long before it became a well-known big ticket destination. I once trout-fished with a fine old English gentleman living in the Salisbury, Wiltshire, area of southern England with whom he used to fish a top-notch northern Icelandic river annually. Most of the British aristocracy used to fish, a few seriously, many others “Well, as we are here…” (visiting the family’s Scots’ sporting estate) socially – “Came with the territory”, so to speak.