Sunday, April 13, 2008

To Honest to be a Guide?

Before I began guiding years ago, I thought about how I am going to handle myself as a fly fishing guide. Luckily, the guides that I, or my Dad hired, were for the most part, good guides. We had the occasional guide that seemed to be on the water just too many days, but it was still a good day of fishing. We also had the misfortune of just having one of those off days in regards to poor fishing conditions and that was on the Green River in Wyoming. We weren’t skunked, but we caught one brown trout.

Coaching sports for as many years as I have, I knew when I started guiding that I had to be honest. Honesty can come into play a lot when you are a guide. There are water conditions to take into condition. There is the recent fishing report of how the river has really been fishing. And then there is the size of fish that are caught. In the five years of guiding I have always tried to be completely honest with my clients. But sometimes the truth just sucks.

I have called clients from the river the day before their trip letting them know that the fishing isn’t productive or the water conditions are bad. There have been times where the client wants to fish anyway, which is ok with me. I just see it as more of a challenge to put clients onto fish in bad conditions. There have been many times where the clients have been shocked that I am telling them that the fishing is slow. It just doesn’t make sense to lie. If I had a float trip scheduled and was forking out $400.00 you are darn right I would want to know if the fishing was going to be bad. I would want to fish when you are going to catch some fish.

I think the one time that being honest really felt bad was when a younger client at 14 years old really wanted to get on the trophy page. So it was his second guided trip that he was taking with me and he really wanted to catch a trophy trout. So he hooks into a trout while nymphing with a Red San Juan worm. This trout takes jumps, makes the kids reel scream and does everything to slip the hook. During the fight, he kept asking, “Do you think it’s a trophy?” over and over. So after a 5 minute fight we were able to land the rainbow trout and it was close. It was real close. I measured twice, and it was right at 17.5”. Being a half an inch short stinks. But, Chris was able to get on the trophy page the following year with a beautiful 21” brown trout, on his birthday no less.