Lori-Ann Murphy

Lori-Ann landed her first steelhead on fly in her late twenties, while wading the Deschutes River. That led her to move to Teton Valley and guide on the Snake River between Wyoming and Idaho for twenty years. Throughout her guide career, she always had a special love for casting. She has won several casting and fishing competitions and represents leadership with her casting approach to fishing.

In 1989, she attended the Orvis Guide Rendezvous with sixteen men. Then-Orvis chairman Leigh Perkins was her first client, fishing Nelson’s Spring Creek. Right there in Livingston, Montana, she knew her life as an RN was going to take a dramatic shift. And it did. Along with some fly-fishing leaders, such as Nancy Zakon and Margot Page, Lori-Ann started the Orvis School for Women in 1992. It was there in Manchester, Vermont, that an entire room of twenty-seven women from all over the USA decided they wanted to go on fly-fishing trips. It was a no brainer for Lori-Ann, who is addicted to fun, to launch Reel Women Fly Fishing Adventures in 1994. RWFFA continues today, twenty-five years later, as a source of inspiration to get women out on the water fly fishing.

To complete her guiding career of thirty years, Lori-Ann has spent the last ten years living for the most part in San Pedro, Belize. She established Reel Belize, a Belize Tour Operator for fly fishing, in 2018. She has guided full-time on the flats and now spends her time training Belizean tour guides to be the best out on the water for her company, Reel Belize. Between living in the tropics and then her beloved West in the summertime, life is pretty good for this veteran fly-fishing guide. It’s Lori-Ann’s true belief that fly-fishing pleasure brings to those who dare – those that want to keep seeing a rainbow trout break the rivers surface with an explosion to the fly on the Big Hole or feel the adrenaline rush from of a huge school of permit charging feathers and fur on the saltwater flats of Ambergris Caye – a life of passion and fun.