I fish with guides and I fish by myself. I tend to use guides when I’ve traveled a ways to get to the water. We’ve been to Montana a couple of times and did floats with guides for everyday of the trip. I figure that if I’m going to fly to Washington State, rent a car and drive three hours, I might as well try to get the most out of the trip and hire guides. Also, I might hire a guide for new water than pick his brain about spots where I can fish on my own. One of the hardest things about new water is figuring out where you can legally access the water. The last thing I need on my day off is some conflict with a local.
Closer to home, I have two guides I use regularly for floats; one for the South Fork of the Shenandoah in Virginia and one for the a couple of rivers in Tennessee. We try to get out with both of them a few times a year and we look forward to the floats for weeks ahead of time. Right now, I have a float with my Shenandoah guide on the books for April and with my Tennessee guide in May. Not only do we catch a lot of fish when we float with these guys, we also have a blast. They’re both very different people. CT, the guide I fish with a lot in Virginia is a retired park ranger. Patrick, the guide from Tennessee, is a young guy in his twenties, just starting out in life. But what they both have in common is that they give a damn. They sincerely want people to have a good time on the river, while respecting it. The care about their clients and they care about their rivers.
We did a float with a guide once in Arkansas and for lunch, he got out a camp stove and made this elaborate meal on the shore. It was nice, but a little weird. It definitely established who the sports were and who the clients were. Both Patrick and CT have a much more relaxed approach to lunch, Patrick has some sandwiches from a local gas station and some chips you can choose from and with CT, we just bring our own lunch. In my opinion, the best lunches on fishing days are simple and eaten in the boat while staring at a rising fish that you plan on casting to as soon as you’re done eating. Lunch is a chance to catch your breath, go take a leak and then get on with it.
Both Patrick and CT are the kind of guys who likes to stay busy. I asked CT what he did on his day off one time and he told me, “I was going to go fishing, but I didn’t feel like dragging the boat out on my one day off this month, you know what I mean?”
Me: “yeah, I could see that.”
CT: “so instead, I just grabbed my chainsaw and cut up this dead ash tree to lay up some firewood for the winter, you know?”
Me: “No.”
Both Patrick and CT seem to be as happy as either I or my wife are when we land a nice fish. Patrick’s a highly technical trout fisherman who enjoys talking fly tying and presentation strategies. CT does some wade guiding for trout in Virginia small streams, but we usually fish with him out of his drift boat for smallies. Like I said, he’s a retired park ranger and a lot of the float is just him telling us stuff he knows about the history of the Shenandoah Valley, the ecology of the river, the names of trees along the bank, or some crazy story about a tourist doing something dumb from his ranger days.
Maybe because we’ve been fishing with CT a long time, or because we’re fishing for smallies and the occasional bluegill, CT floats are relaxed. We know we’re going to catch fish, probably a lot of them, and let’s all just take what the river gives us. D and I have been fishing with CT a few times a year for about four years now and it’s as comfortable as it gets. It’ll usually start out with him saying to me, “get one off that gravel bar while I rig up D’s rod. You think the Nats are going to make the playoffs this year? Hey D, how’s your dad doing?” and we’re off. No lie, I have had hundred fish days on a CT float. The South Fork is a numbers fishery, but they’ll be some nice ones in the mix. One time, my back cast hit the water and when I came forward with it, there was a bluegill on the line. Bass fishing is convincing yourself you’re a hotshot and trout fishing is about taking a big old ose of reality.
With Patrick, the quarry is browns and bows. The rivers we fish in Tennessee haven’t stocked brown in over 20 years, so if you catch one a brown in either river, they were born wild and free. Both rivers have stocked rainbows and also wild bows. One river in particular has a population of beautiful wild rainbows and you know as soon as you see one in your net in didn’t grow up in any tank. D, Patrick and I all enjoy these wild bows. Their colors are amazing, deep red stripes, green backs and sides that are almost bronze colored. Their fins are crisp and they fight all the way into the net and then keep on fighting. You catch a couple of those then hook in to a stocky twice its size and you know immediately, the stocky gives up as if it gets that the deck has been stacked against him since day one. Get a stocky to the boat and he’s all beat up, fins rubbed smooth, no color and they look like they should have jailhouse ink and be smoking a cigarette. Patrick calls them junkyard dog fish.
As a trash talker myself, I really appreciate Patrick’s ability to give me grief. Last year, I broke off a big beautiful rainbow, easily 25 inches. We could see it in gin clear water feeding with a bunch of smaller trout. I had picked off some of the smaller ones behind the hog and was going for the big boy. Patrick told me that when I hooked him, he was going to take off like a rocket and in this shallow water, he’d break off pretty easy if I didn’t let him run. Then I got him to eat my fly and he took off like a rocket in shallow water and broke me off. I had him on just long enough to realize that I had hooked him against all odds, then I was holding slack line in my hand.
D said, “oh, sweetie, I thought you had him.” Patrick said, “don’t worry about it, you’ll get another shot like that in about 20 years.” We decided it was a good time to break for lunch. Twenty minutes later, halfway through my sandwich, Patrick asked me how old I was. I told him fifty. “Okay,” he said, “so in 20 years, you’ll be 70, you’ll get another shot at a fish like that sometime in your early 70s. That’s if you can still get out on the water. Yup, sure would have been nice to land that fish. I have the camera right here, good light, would have been a good pic.” Patrick’s smart enough to figure out who he can talk trash to and who he can’t. Another angler, I’m sure he would have been, “don’t worry about it sir, I couldn’t have landed that fish, it was good angling just to hook him.” I take it as a compliment that he was busting my balls.
I booked my trips for next year with both Patrick and CT the day after that float.
First Fish 