The Golden Vise Award is presented each year to the top Fly Tyer in the state. Unlike other awards, this is a people's choice award. That is, people go to a poll taking web site and pick the tyer that they think is the best. The person making the submission needs to fill in the person's first and last name, the person's phone number (more about this later), the city where the person lives, the pattern that the person making the submission feels is the best one that the fly tyer does, and where the submitter learned about the Montana Golden Vise Award. Those are the five questions and it takes about a minute to complete the poll.

The guy over at http://www.montanaflyfishingtips.com will tally up the results and the winner will be contacted by phone to notify them that they have won the award. The other purpose of the call is to set up a conference call with the winner. The conference call will be open to the public and people can call in and listen to the call as the interviewer finds out about the winner, patterns they like to do best, which ones they find most difficult, how long they have been tying flies, what is the one tool they could not live without, etc. The conference call will take about 60 minutes. The call will be made available on an MP3 file at the completion of the call and will be online.

The winner of the Golden Vise Award will receive a certificate letting everyone who sees the award know that they are the First Place winner of the 2006 Montana Golden Vise Award for Montana. There will be three 2nd place winners who will also receive certificates. The poll will be live for two months, until June 30th. The final four tyers will be announced and another poll will be taken to decide who of the final four is the winner. The winner will be announced on September 1st.

People interested in The Golden Vise Awards for other states can go to http://www.goldenvise.com for the dates of other awards that will be presented. The Wyoming awards are next beginning on June 1st, followed by Colorado, and Idaho on August 1st.

The Golden Vise web site is nonprofit. While the annual awards are presented using personal funds, contributions from organizations and companies in the fly tying business are gratefully accepted at the bottom of the http://www.goldenvise web page.

Jim Fortune writes on a variety of subjects ranging from personal finance, to the Internet, to fly fising. He was a former stockbroker who bootstrapped his own ISP and sold at the top and is now concentrating on fly fishing and the pleasure it brings.