Our Team
Chrome Chasers runs two seasons and two very different programs, but the team behind both is small by design. Rick and Dori are here every week of every season. The guides they bring in are people they fish with, trust, and have shared a table with for years. Everyone here cares about these fish and these waters — not as a policy, but as a conviction.
Chris Maher
Chris Maher grew up in Pleasant Hill, California and has spent the better part of the last decade and a half putting in the kind of guiding hours that quietly add up to genuine expertise. He started on the trout waters of Northern California and the Truckee region, earned his Eagle Scout and his Coast Guard captain's license, and eventually made his way north to Southeast Alaska, where he spent years guiding out of Baranof Wilderness Lodge under Mike Trotter — one of the more respected operations in the region.
These days, Chris divides his guiding calendar the way serious steelhead anglers tend to: winters on the Olympic Peninsula out of Forks, Washington with Brazda's Fly Fishing, summers on the trout rivers around Missoula, where he and his wife have put down roots. He's fished widely and purposefully — trout in Patagonia, sea-run browns in Tierra del Fuego, bonefish and saltwater species in Mexico, Christmas Island, and Alaska — and he brings that range of experience to the water without making it a talking point.
Chris joined the Chrome Chasers steelhead team in 2021. He guides the spring program each April and May, working the small streams of the Tongass alongside Rick with the same unhurried attention the fishery demands.
Rick has spent more time watching wild steelhead move through the rivers of Southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest than arguably anyone alive. He has been guiding these waters for over two decades — rotating rivers every seven to ten days to minimize pressure, fishing exclusively catch-and-release with single barbless hooks, and contributing genetic sampling data to the Wild Salmon Center's research on these fish. He knows where they hold, how they move, and what the river looks like when something is about to happen. That same depth of knowledge carries into every other corner of the Chrome Chasers week. Rick is a licensed Coast Guard Captain, an accomplished chef, and the person running the Chromagnum through Southeast Alaska's inland passages before most guests have finished their coffee. He built the smokehouse behind the lodge, manages the crab and shrimp pots, and is just as comfortable at a fillet table or a kitchen stove as he is on a steelhead river. The food guests eat each evening is largely a product of what he pulled from the water that day. Chrome Chasers is Rick's program in every sense — the conservation ethic, the remote access, the standard of the table. He built it that way on purpose.
Hawaii on the Fly has been doing this for 30 years, and Kenny Karas has been at the center of it the whole time. He runs the first flats boat guide service in Hawaii for world-class bonefish — rated among the world's top ten destinations for fish over 10 pounds by the IGFA. Based in Kailua on Oahu, Kenny specializes in 100% sight fishing for o'io — the Hawaiian word for bonefish — fish that are notoriously large, wary, and unforgiving of a bad cast.
Rick and Kenny go back years, crossing paths on Oahu and Molokai, where the two spent time guiding fishing and hunting trips together long before Kenny ever set foot in Alaska. That history is what brought him to the Chrome Chasers team in 2021, and it shows on the water. Kenny guides the Fall Fishing and Foraging program each August and September, bringing the same precision and patience he developed chasing tailing fish on Hawaiian flats to Southeast Alaska's salmon streams, ocean grounds, and old-growth creek corridors.
Two more different fisheries are hard to imagine. He handles both without missing a beat.
Dori Matney
Dori Matney was born and raised in Bozeman, Montana. Her father farmed in the Dutch community of Churchill, just west of town, and spent his off seasons in real estate, always with an eye toward the next opportunity. Her mother worked as a registered nurse in the ICU. Dori grew up splitting time between the farm in the summers and helping her dad with his various real estate ventures, and that combination of land and an eye for opportunity has shaped the way she approaches everything since.
She spent a few years in real estate herself and genuinely loved it. That foundation is what pointed her and Rick toward the lodge in Alaska, and the knowledge she built during those years has allowed them to put down deeper roots in Bozeman, creating the base from which all of their businesses have grown.
At Chrome Chasers, Dori runs everything that keeps the week moving: reservations, correspondence, invoicing, the website, and the lodge itself. She's in the kitchen most mornings before guests are up and most evenings while Rick is still at the fillet table. She also handles the foraging side of the program with genuine enthusiasm — the mushrooms, the berries, the tides.
It's a life that takes her between Bozeman, Wrangell, and Hawaii, which is not the trajectory she would have drawn for herself. She grew up convinced Montana was the most beautiful place on earth and that she'd never need to go far to find it. Southeast Alaska changed that. The old-growth forest, the tides, the mountains dropping straight into the water — it got under her skin in a way she didn't expect. So did the people. Wrangell is a small, remote island community, and the people who choose to live there are a different breed entirely. Getting to know them, and that corner of the world, has left a mark. It turned out better than she imagined.