Things They Might Not Teach You In Guide Class
Its springtime in Colorado, and all over the Rocky Mountain west young men and women who dream of becoming fishing guides are signing up for Guide Class. Taking a class with an outfitter is the first step on that road, and its also the way that outfitters recruit new guides for their upcoming season. Most guides start off doing wade trips, and then over time buy a boat to guide from that. Guiding from a boat requires a skill set that goes beyond what’s required for a wade trip. Great float fish guides are hard to find, and are both made and born. That’s because the fishing skills needed to be a good guide can only be learned through lots of practice. But to have a personality that someone will want to spend a long day in a boat with is something you can’t really teach. There are plenty of guys who are great fishermen, but lousy guides. Then there are those who customers love to be with, but can’t catch a fish with an M-80 and a large net.
Fishing from a boat has some inherent differences than fishing from a bank does. When wade fishing, an angler has time to scope out the river and determine where the best spot might be to find a feeding fish to fool. You get to think about the current, and what it will do to your line and drifting fly, and how much room you’ll have for your backcast. You’ve got the time to look into the river and see what insects are about, and what the angle of the sun and direction of the wind is. If you work a hole with a fly without success, you can try a different fly or presentation.
On a boat, you often get only one opportunity to make that perfect cast or drift. You need to always have a corner of your eye looking downstream at what’s coming up next, and not at that perfect feeding lie you’ve just floated past. It’s your job a as a guide to remind customers of that.
Having been a float fishing guide for some time now, I’ve learned a few things through experience that have made me a better at what I do. For those looking to better their experience while fishing from a boat on moving water, here are a few things to think about that might help.
Getting To Know Your Customer
Before getting on the water, it’s important to know what your customer’s ability, experience, and expectations are. Are they a newbie, or do they have more experience than you do? Knowing what their expectations are will go a long way towards making a successful day on the water. In a commercial setting, a guide will often not meet their client until the morning of their trip, so its important to make the most use of the time you have before you step onto the boat. If they’re beginners, spend some time on the bank practicing casting before you’re on the water and in motion. If you’re launching from a busy public ramp, know some spot that’s not too far downstream from which you can have the room to do so. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fishy hole, the idea is to let them make enough practice casts so that they’re ready for when you do find a spot with fish. Sometimes the only opportunity you’ll get to pick their brain is on the shuttle ride to the put in, so don’t waste it telling them how great you are. Use that time to find out about them, and how they fish. Do they prefer to nymph fish, or use dry flies, or are they from Florida and have only chucked streamers? When I take beginners, I try to make a point of trying each of those methods during our day together to see what they like best, and not just run the same nymph rig all day. How can they know what they like if they haven’t tried it? There are an almost infinite number of ways to fly fish, which is one of the things that make it to stimulating.
Before Setting Off
Determine who is going to be in front of the boat and who will be the back. I typically have the angler who needs the most instruction positioned in front, so I can watch what they’re doing and offer instructions. If both anglers have similar experience, I’ll suggest that we split the day so that each gets to spend time in front. The person who is in front typically get the first chance at each hole, so its nice for each of them to have that opportunity.
Its also a good time to let them each know what their responsibilities are. On a moving river like the Colorado, the angler in front should be casting towards the bank at about a 45 degree angle. This accomplishes several things at once. First, casting downstream usually makes for the best presentation. The fish get to see the fly before the boat or the line, and it also makes for a better drift. Since the water along the edge of the river is usually moving slower than the water in the middle where the boat is, a downstream cast will make it much easier to mend the line. A second advantage is that by having the front angler making casts that are downstream of the boat, it will keep them looking ahead at the next good spot that’s coming, and not thinking about the one they just passed by. The third reason for the person up front to be casting out ahead is that if they don’t, they force the person in the rear of the boat to cast behind the boat, too. Even if the guide is doing a lot of backrowing to slow down, the boat will still want to overtake the fly. If the person in front is casting directly towards the bank, or even worse behind it, then the angler in back has nowhere to cast but even further behind. It will be almost impossible for them to get a perfect drift. Unless they’re tossing streamers, they’re going to have a long day.
The angler in the rear of the boat only has one thing to worry about, and that’s to watch when their buddy up front is casting, and to not cast at the same time. Since the angler up front will be looking downriver, they’ll have no idea when their partner out back is casting. Its up to the rear angler, who should also be looking downstream, to accommodate the person in front so that both casters rigs don’t get snared mid-air. The only thing worse than having to re-rig a multi-fly setup is having to re-tie two.
Rowing
Fish don’t seem to be all that worried or notice boats too much. In fact, one of the first things they do when hooked sometimes is race towards the boat, and the deep safe-seeming shadow it casts. But what they will notice is your oars. Since fish don’t have ears, they won’t hear many sounds from above the water line. You could probably play some hair metal band at full volume on a boombox and they wouldn’t care (but I would, so if you see me on the river please turn it off). However, they do have lateral lines which are extremely sensitive to vibrations, so learn to be gentle with your oars when rowing. Try to keep any splashing or unnecessary strokes to a minimum, especially in quieter water.
Communication
As you make your way down the river, there are times when you’ll want to turn your boat one way or another, or have to move from one side of the river to the opposite bank. Before you do, let your clients know that you will be doing so. This gives them a moment to hold off on casting, and will reduce the odds the anglers will get their lines crossed. If you have a boat with an exposed anchor rope, also let them know when you will be raising or lowering the anchor so that their line doesn’t get snagged by it.
Lefty/Righty
One thing that’s different about fishing from a boat than wade fishing is one person will usually have a more obstructed cast than the other. In the case of casting from a boat, the obstruction won’t be in the form of a tree branch behind you, but it’s due to the fact that there are three people all sharing a very limited amount of space, two of whom have fly lines looping around overhead.
In a scenario where there are two righthanded anglers on board, one person will usually have an unobstructed cast and the other’s will be somewhat hampered. For example, if you are in a boat casting towards the right bank, a righthanded angler in the front will have to be aware that a normal cast runs the risk of hooking their guide or partner with their backcast. However, the righthanded caster in the back of the boat has all the room in the world for their cast. When fishing the left side of the river, the roles are reversed. Now the righthanded angler in front casting towards the left has plenty of room, but the person in back has to worry about taking off my hat with his airborne flies. Since in an average day you’ll spend half on one side and half on the other, it all evens out.
The other scenario is one where there will be one lefty and one righty. This is great on one side of the river, because both anglers will have room to cast. But on the other side, both will be obstructed. So instead of having half your day being great, and the other half not so much, there is one mitigating strategy you can employ, and that’s to go stern-first (backwards) when on what would otherwise be their weak sides. Thus, if you are fishing with a lefthander up front and a righty in back, you would point your boat downriver when fishing the right bank. But when you fish the left bank, by spinning the boat around 180 degrees, they can still both have unobstructed casts. This also has the added benefit of giving each anglers an equal opportunity to be in the “front” of the boat. The only downside to this approach is that as the person rowing, you might get a sore neck from looking backwards for half the day. But the priority for a guide is to do everything in you can to put your clients in a position where they can be successful. Its not about you, but the people who have spent a lot of money to be out there with you. A sore neck is what Advil is for.
Identifying Your Customers Strengths And Weaknesses
Some experienced customers know exactly what they want to do, and how to do it. They know where the best fishing lies are, have the skills to put their flies there, and can also mend the line just so to get a perfect drift. All you need to do is keep the boat a consistent distance from the bank, and they can do the rest. These are my favorite customers to have on my boat (along with attractive females), but unfortunately you may only get one or two of each per season. The rest will either have some skills, or worse their skills aren’t as good as they think they are. Some anglers can cast great but not mend, others can expertly mend a fly but only cast ten feet from the boat. Some will spend all day casting behind the boat, while others will not be able to pause long enough on their backcast to load the rod, and you’ll spend the day untying “wind” knots. Its important to try and identify your customer’s shortcomings early, and to gently recommend ways to correct them. Because of this, its almost easier to guide someone who is a raw beginner than it is to have someone who thinks that they’re already great at it. At least a beginner is open to instruction, where an experienced person might bristle at your suggestions. I have one customer who is one of the best casters I’ve ever seen but won’t let the fly float long enough to actually catch many fish. He’ll make an accurate cast and put his fly ten inches from the bank, then make a perfect mend, but will only let the fly float for about a foot before pulling it out and repeating the process. Meanwhile, he’ll miss ten feet of perfect water that pass by while his flies are in the air forming his next cast. He does catch fish, but about a quarter of what he might if he would just keep his flies on the water longer, (which is where the fish are). As a guide you’ll run into all personality types, and some will take instruction and some will not. The kind of people who can afford to spend $500 to spend the day fishing when they could do it for free tend to be those who have attained a certain level of success in life. They probably manage a business of some sort and are used to giving orders, not taking them. On top of the technical skills needed to be a good guide, there is also a certain level of emotional intelligence needed as well. Learning what you can and can’t control will make the difference between a long day on the water, and one you’ll hate to see end because you’re enjoying it as much as they are.
Getting Them Out Of Their Comfort Zone
Most people will just fish with one hand all day long, because that’s what they’re used to doing. Fly casting is difficult enough to do with your dominant hand, why would you want to ever switch? If you’re fishing from a boat, there are several good reasons, and the first relates to the aforementioned lefty\righty scenarios. If you can convince your customers to try using their off hand, then no one ever has to have an obstructed cast no matter what bank you are casting towards. This isn’t something that I suggest while clients are fishing multi-fly rigs like nymphs or hopper/droppers, but I do when we are fishing streamers. The reason is that casting streamers are much easier than other rigs, since they’re are weighted and the casting motion is much simpler. Streamers on a medium sized river like the Upper Colorado often work best being tossed towards the bank or around structure, twitched or stripped for a couple of feet, and then pulled out and quickly cast again. Fish are usually holding within a few feet of the bank, and not out in the heavy current. If a fish hasn’t begun to chase your flies within the first few feet, they’re not going to, so there’s no reason to work that fast water that the boat is in. We’ll usually set up fifteen or twenty feet from the bank, cast towards that soft water along the edge, and swim the flies back until they are in the faster water. If there is some big brown trout chasing it, then you keep stripping the flies all the way to the boat to stimulate the fish’s chase response. If there aren’t any chasers, then you pull the flies back out, ideally before they’re more than halfway to the boat. This way you begin your backcast while you still have enough tension on your line to load the rod. In very short order, casting streamers becomes an easy, repetitious motion that’s easy to do with either hand. It might take fifty casts to master it, but in fast moving water like that you’ll have fifty casts under your belt in just a few minutes. In a half hour, most people can cast streamers as well with their left hand as their right.
Then the other advantages to off hand casting become apparent. For one thing, in a righty/righty scenario, if one angler is willing to cast with his off hand then you are now fishing righty/lefty, so no matter what side of the river you’re on both anglers have an unobstructed cast. The next advantage might only become apparent after the day is over. By spending some portion of the day casting with the arm you don’t normally use, you are saving a lot of wear and tear on you regular arm. Streamer fishing is a very active, tiring way to fish. If you are doing it correctly, then your casting arm is in almost constant motion. Every cast you make with your left arm is one less you are making with your right. Finally, your client is learning a new skill, which might serve them well someday if they’re righthanded, and find themselves having to make an upstream cast from the left bank while wade fishing. I’m still not great at casting lefthanded, but I can if I have to and its because of the time I’ve spent casting streamers lefthanded from a boat.
The Lift & Drift
There are going to be days on the water when you have to deal with wind, and not just if you fish in Wyoming. Sometimes I’ll set up in the bottom of the big eddy so that clients can cast upstream with the wind at their backs. Or I’ll have them try to tune into the wind’s rhythm, and make their casts between the gusts. But you can’t hold in the same eddy forever, eventually you have to make your way down the river. Hopper/dropper rigs have one fly that will cut right through the wind, weighted nymph, but the hopper itself is large and unaerodynamic. The two flies have characteristics that are completely opposite, so trying to cast them into the wind is a fool’s errand.
There’s a technique that I call the Lift & Drift to help mitigate the effects of the wind, and to keep fishing even while in motion. The Lift & Drift works on the principal that things in the water will float faster then those things floating on the water. An example of the first would be insects both real and artificial, and example of the latter would be a boat. The key to making the Lift & Drift work is to identify the thalweg, or the part of the river where the flows are the strongest. This is typically where the bubble line is, and may have spinners in it if there was a morning hatch. Even on windy days, the thalweg will often look smooth as glass, even with the water’s surface rippled everywhere else. Feeding fish don’t care about the wind that’s making things difficult above the water’s surface. Its often just a matter of drifting your flies in that sweet spot and keeping them there long enough for a trout to see them.
The Lift & Drift works by putting the boat in the thalweg, having the client make a downstream cast, and fishing below the boat. The boat will follow the flies and we use the current to carry the fly out away from the boat. Often in the face of an uphill wind, their cast will just land in a big heap, but that’s OK. The current will carry the fly or flies downstream over the feeding fish, and that’s the Drift part. Eventually however the line will run out of slack, and the top fly, usually a big foam-bodied hopper, will begin to drag. It will first create a v-wake, and then get pulled under. However, if the angler slowly raises their rod tip as the drag begins, they can lift that fly out enough to put more slack in their line, and then gently lower it again, resuming their fly’s downstream drift. You do this until it begins to drag again, lift, and repeat the process. If the uphill wind is gentle, I hold the boat sideways so that the angler in the front and back can each work the bubble line. If the wind is stronger, then the boat will probably need to be pointed downriver into the wind, and only the person up front will get to do this. But the Lift & Drift can be a very effective way to keep fishing even into the teeth of a strong wind, by using what the river gives you, i.e., steady current, and not trying to fight the wind. Also, it’s often the moment when the angler slowly lifts line up to impart slack back into the line that the trout will move in and take the fly, especially when fishing dries.
Tenkara
Tenkara is an ancient Asian style of fishing originally intended to fish small headwater streams, or what our grandparents would have called cane pole fishing. A tenkara rod is very long, 11 to 13 feet, and uses no reel, just a long line and leader combination. Tenkara in its purest form uses specific flies with a forward hackle that are gently pulsed to give the flies a lifelike motion. If you want to really get into it, you could probably light some incense or a candle, and get on your knees and say a prayer before casting. I don’t bother with any of that, and simply view a tenkara rod as a different kind to fly rod. I rig the terminal tackle exactly as I would a conventional rod, i.e. a hopper/dropper, or nymph rig, or double dry fly. I’ve even used unweighted Wooly Buggers and caught fish that way.
You don’t often see anglers using tenkara rods from a boat, and for the life of me I can’t understand why they aren’t. There are many reasons why you would want to have a tenkara rod or two on your boat. For one thing, they are telescopic, so they don’t take up any room at all. I’ve got at least a couple rigged and ready for every float I do, even on scenic floats when we’re not even planning to fish. The next is that because they are so easy to cast, they’re great for beginners. One of the things that give beginners trouble when learning to cast is that the pause on the backcast while getting the rod to load is constantly changing, depending on how much line is out in the air. Since a tenkara has a fixed length of line, the pause on the backcast never changes. It’s a lift, pause, then forward with the rod. Lift, pause, forward. Lift, pause forward. It makes casting incredibly easy. In most cases, beginners are casting beautifully in very short order. And that ease of casting translates into anglers casting equally well with either hand. There is no righty/lefty conundrum, for most minimally coordinated people can do it just as well with either hand.
Now that the angler isn’t having to think about how to cast, they can concentrate on the matter at hand, which is fishing, not casting. And the fishing part is now easier, because with the longer length of rod, an angler has far more control over their lines and flies than they would with a conventional shorter rod. Mending is much more important than casting when it comes to catching fish, and beginners (and experts) can mend easier with a tenkara rod. This mending ability comes in handy when working some of the big, foamy eddies that the Upper C is noted for. Being able to hold your leader up out of all those spinning eddies keeps flies floating long enough for a hungry trout to see them.
Having a tenkara rod on hand is also a great way to get spin fishermen into fly fishing. When guiding spin fishermen I’ll usually wait until they’ve caught a couple their way, and at some point will suggest that they try a tenkara. The advantage to it is that in faster water, they can spend more time with their fly in the softer where the fish are, along the bank, and less time with the spinning lure in the heavy water No Fish Zone reeling their lure in readying for the next cast.
The one situation that tenkara is not good for though is in the wind. When its windy, you end up with wind drag and not water drag, and tenkara rods a pretty useless.
There is one adaptation that you need to make to use a tenkara rod to fish from a boat, and that is to make a longer setup than you would if you were fishing some small spring creek. For a typical 12 foot long tenkara rod, one might have a line and leader combination of perhaps 15 feet to fish small water. This allows an angler to land their fish by holding the rod up over their head with one hand, and to land the fish with the other. However, a rig that short would mean that while working one’s way down the river, the boat would have to be too close to the bank to get the fly near the bank, which would spook fish. So to use a tenkara rod on the river, I typically rig a line/leader combination eighteen to twenty feet long. This is usually just about right to put your fly a foot or two off the bank. The interesting part comes when a fish is hooked, and it’s time to get it into the net. Often, we can get a fish close but not quite close enough. In these circumstances, I’ll hop out of the boat and land the fish beside it. It’s a bit inconvenient, but its usually easier on the fish and makes it simpler to release it. Its also a great perspective to take a photo of both anglers when they’re in the boat, and you’re not. I’ll hold the fish up in my left hand and take the picture with my right, and having the fish in the foreground makes all three subjects roughly the same size.
There is also one last sneaky advantage for a guide when their customers are using a tenkara rod, and that is it’ll make you feel like you are the one fishing, not just the client. When I’ve got someone using a tenkara, I’ll typically have them positioned in front, and keep the bow of the boat angled towards the bank. When they make a cast, the fly will only go so far due to the finite amount of length of their setup. If its not close enough to the bank to hit the seam we’re aiming for, I’ll have them cast again. As they do I’ll turn the bow a little closer, so that their next cast lands closer to where we want it to be. In effect, I’m the one who is placing the fly in the correct spot, not them. This gets me more engaged in the whole process, since it feels like I’m the one fishing, and they just happen to be holding the rod.
Conclusion
Guiding fishermen from a boat can be a great way to make a living, since you’ve got the world’s best office. The longer you do it, the more ways you will learn to improve the experience for both you and your customer. Just try to keep an open mind and be ready to “go with the flow”!
Jack Bombardier
Confluence Casting LLC
jack@confluencecasting.com
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