When I first spoke to Greg Madrigal, he had just returned from a backpacking trip in the Golden Trout Wilderness, where he hooked over a hundred of our state fish, up to 12 inches.
A member of the Fly Fishers Club of Orange County, Madrigal says that enticing trout to a fly is what he enjoys most about our sport. However, he lives in Garden Grove and mainly fishes nearby waters, such as the Pacific Ocean and the Los Angeles River — the focus of a more than billion-dollar restoration effort to clean it up and restore it, including its fish populations.
He fly fishes a two-mile stretch of this mostly concrete-lined waterway, primarily for carp — in his words “a very challenging fish to bring to a fly, especially the lunkers that inhabit these waters.” (Other species caught there are tilapia, largemouth bass, and green sunfish. Will steelhead come back?)
Madrigal’s early career was in door and window production, where he spent 13 years managing milling shops. His exceptional woodworking skills and love of fly fishing spurred him to leave the “corporate BS” and strike out on his own as a maker of high-end artistic fishing nets. You can see a gallery of completed nets at https://sierra-nets.com.
Madrigal says he loves creating things with his hands — sketching, painting, woodworking, metalworking, fly tying, and the like. With these skills, he says, “I never doubted my ability to make the world’s finest net.”
He quickly discovered that few tools exist for making the kind of nets he envisioned. So he made his own, principally a horizontal drilling machine, a “breakthrough” machine that took him two years to fabricate.
What distinguishes Madrigal’s nets are his artistic designs, which typically mimic the rich coloration and spotting of varied trout species. To produce such images, he relies strictly on the natural colors of the wood and inlaid minerals with which he works. He reports, “I carve them freehand using a pneumatic 400K-rpm rotary tool, then inlay natural minerals and metals, such as Kingman turquoise, bronze, fire coral, brass, silver, chrysocolla, anthracite, and magnesite. These will be there for the life of the net, even if it is completely sanded down and refinished down the road.” (As with the horizontal drilling machine, Madrigal’s techniques in producing the inlaid images are proprietary.)
In any given year, Madrigal completes approximately 70 to 80 nets, each taking about 20 to 30 hours to complete. But he refers to himself as a “functional artist,” and at this stage in his career, he prefers to be known for his artistry, rather than simply as a maker of nets. His nets certainly are functional works of art.
