Being Guided
Whether you’ve fished a little or a lot, being guided is a treat. How to make the most of your day with a guide is partly common sense, but partly something you learn with experience. From watching hundreds of guide trips go out from Henry’s Fork Lodge, taking some myself, and talking often to both guides and clients, here’s one key suggestion:
The single most important thing you can do is to tell your guide your preferences and expectations for the day.
For example, would you rather:
Wade, or fish from a boat?
Fish a lake, or fish a stream?
Cast blind or stalk individual rising fish?
Land as many fish as possible, or concentrate on catching a really big one?
Focus on catching fish, or improve your casting?
Catch fish, or see to it that your spouse or child has a great time?
Go to the place that’s been fishing best, or fish a beautiful place in solitude?
Catch fish, or see Yellowstone Park with fishing as an incidental activity?
As to the first three examples, you may or may not have a preference, but if you do, you should definitely make it known to your guide from the start. As to other examples, the choices aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but they do illustrate the competing priorities you might have for a day of guided fishing. Your answers to those choices may well change from day to day. You and your guide will have the best day if you’re both on the same page as to your expectations for the day. A guide should engage you in a friendly morning chat to draw those expectations out of you before you head off for your chosen fishing spot.
A particular guide trip in a past season stands out in my memory. One of my favorite guides greeted a couple of Lodge guests and asked them, “What’s your goal for the day today?” It was clear from their reaction that the guests weren’t expecting that question, but they thought about it and answered that they were pretty new to flyfishing and wanted to learn about casting and other skills even more than they wanted to catch fish. The guests were a father and teenage son, and it turned out that the father’s fondest hope was that the two of them would find a sport that they could enjoy doing together. With the guide’s coaching, they both took a huge step forward in their flyfishing abilities, found an activity that they enjoyed doing together and caught plenty of good fish in the bargain. The father later told me how surprised he had been by the guide’s question and what a home run it was.
I believe every good guide should figure out the answer to that question before taking his clients fishing. Even the good ones, however, sometimes fall into the habit of assuming (usually correctly) that the clients just want to catch as many fish, preferably large, as possible. If that’s not your object in taking a guide - and the guide doesn’t do his job of finding out – let him know as soon as you can. At the Lodge, the few guide trips that go awry usually are not because the guide isn’t trying or the fishing is slow, but rather because guide and clients have different ideas of what’s going to make for a good day.
One of the most common choices guides and clients discuss is fishing methods. Day in and day out, probably the most reliable way to catch fish in many of our waters is with a pair of nymphs, usually weighted, and a large indicator. Deadly as it is, that method doesn’t require or teach a great deal about good casting. A certain percentage of people would rather sacrifice the numbers of fish caught in order to fish a dry fly or a nymph without indicator and work on their casting with the guide. They may feel that it’s more important to make a permanent improvement in their casting than to post a high one-day score of fish landed. Others don’t want or need the casting practice and just want to concentrate on catching fish. Whichever you choose, you and your guide need to be clear.
The flip side to the suggestion I offer to clients is the suggestion I’ve made to guides: The bottom line for any guide trip is that the clients have a great time. You need to figure out in advance what that means for your particular clients, because it’s not necessarily just catching a lot of fish.
It’s definitely the guide’s job to ask, so try to be responsive when he does. If he doesn’t, try to make your preferences and expectations clear to him.