I could make the obvious analogy to prostitution, but hey people -- I have been working as a technical writer for over ten years!
Let's face it. Guides will not disagree; some very lame shit happens on guided fishing trips. People with no knowledge of fishing, no skill for fishing, and, worst, no love of fishing, go out and defile the worlds best "fisheries" (a guide-ish term that I despise!) just because they had the 3 to 700-dollar wallet to pay a guide.
Case in point is a dude I met on the Wangapeka river in New Zealand last month. I was on the tenth and last day of a long backpack trip, drying out by the Rolling Junction hut and waiting for my ride back to civilization and hot showers. He and his client, a mellow-looking English bloke, were looking for some fishable water after a night of really really heavy rains. Bless them, I knew too well that they were looking in the wrong spot, for I had camped out during the whole pissing rainy night and watched the tiny, clear Wangapeka turn into a big, brown class IV torrent . . . . Anyway, to pass the time (and probably to try and sell me), the guide started showing me pictures of fat fish from a couple of rivers not far from where I had fished that week. I told him I had got a similar fish from the river, and described the touch-and-go fight that brought the fish to the net.
Oh yeah mite, you guttah fullow the fish downstream or you're funished! I hed this group of ex-football playahs from the Stites, and they refused to do it. Kipt on standing there while the fish wint a hundrid yahds downstream! I tell ya, mite, there must be twinty fish in that stream with five feet of leader hanging out there mouths, broke right where the flourocarbon leader broke off, rubbing on some rock . . . .
And I'm there thinking, yeah, that makes sense, that the long, fine leaders would break in such cases. But what doesn't compute is this: why in hell were those stupid ass goobers out on some stream where they had no right whatsoever being, and why didn't you get disgusted, tell them all to stick their cash up their fat asses, and QUIT! Right on the spot!
Poor bastard. He had money to make, a reputation to uphold. And in guiding, you don't do that by being proud and ethical; you do it by keeping your clients satisfied, and getting their fat-fish pictures and their word-of-mouth recommendations to their well-heeled (if poorly skilled) friends.
That was a sad weird tale. I also do have a first-hand story of how sordid guiding gets in New Zealand, where there are big, beautiful fish in numerous lovely mountain streams, but not really a whole hell of a lot of fish. By this I mean, a place where big, smart trout get caught once a season before they smarten up, if that often.
But anyway, this story starts when I am on my second day of backpacking ever in New Zealand, and my first day of actually fishing in New Zealand, at sundown, looking at a big pool on a small stream with two big, giant, brown trout holding in the tail. I sneak up behind them with the UTMOST caution and stealth -- which you absolutely have to do in order to have any hope of a hookup -- and make a near-perfect cast on an 18-foot 5x tipped leader in windless conditions (god help you with that kind of leader if there's a downstream breeze), drifted it right over the first fish, and -- and -- watched the fish lazily look up and refuse my lovely size 18 EHC. What? HOW?!? I too refused to accept this, and decided to camp out next to the pool so that I could try it again in the morning.
Later I would learn that casting to inactive fish is near useless, except as target-enhanced casting practice. I would also learn that it usually takes much longer than overnight for a fish who is "doggo" to come back to life and feed. But first, I had to learn how it feels to be awoken from peaceful hammock sleep by a fucking helicopter. Yeah, I knew what this meant, and I have never zipped out of my sleeping bag and got ready for the day faster than I did that morning. It was just fast enough: as soon as I stepped foot in the water I saw three people, out there in what I thought was crazy remote woods, walking upstream in my direction. Jeezus. I started casting to my fossilized browns, still holding in the same spot, and tried to pretend I didn't know other humans were there.
Yeah, fat chance. While I'm hunched over casting in extreme stealth mode, a largely pregnant woman (no lie; it was bizarre) -- the guide's wife and chosen ambassador -- calls out, "Gudday!" I mutter something to the effect that I would like to be more quiet, and she replies, "Ow, they won't hear us TALKING up here." Long story short, I had to talk to this most unlikely of interlopers in my solo fishing tramp, and ended up talking also to her guide husband as well as "Dave from Beverly Hills," a hopelessly clueless-looking portly man with white sunscreen smeared all over his face on a cloudy day. Good on ya Dave, for having the cash on hand to hire a helicopter and two generations of guidefolk to get you to your fish. All I had was months of homework, a few thousand dollars in equipment, and a lifetime of experience, fitness, and mental preparation. Its cumulative effect was shattered by that "Gudday!" in one half-second.
Negotiations ensued. Since I was heading downstream anyway, I agreed to take the lower water while they continued to the upper. This partitioning would be beyond consideration in fish-infested Alaska, but in New Zealand it matters: fish who have been fished over go "doggo" for days, and fishing to already-stalked fish is useless, as aforementioned. In fact, the guide was a bit visibly upset that he hadn't seen my camp from the air. "We look for tints," he said. But I was hidden in the trees in my hammock. So they were forced to share the river with me, poor fellas (and pregnant gals). "Wall, we'll let ya hev this pool anyway," the guide graciously said in farewell. And then, to my drop-jawed amazement, the guide walked forty feet upstream and got his client started casting in the head of said pool.
Nick, or Niel, or something like that, based out of Nelson. Locals should know him. Actual fisherman should avoid him.
And fuck yeah, the grapes are sour -- how the hell would you feel if you walked twenty painful miles, banging down 3000 feet with nine days of food and fuel in your pack, only to be jumped by a grinning Beverly Hillbilly and his lying sack of shit guide? LAME!!!
This is why I'm not so sure about starting that other blog. To be different from this one, it would have to strive for a degree of helpfulness and objectivity. It would have to focus on how to find information in bulletin boards and books and maps, and how to get self and rod to the water cheaply and independently and all that jazz that I have been playing for a decade or so. It would have to avoid being negative about guides and what they do to fishing and to places to fish, and, for the moment, I'm not sure I'm ready for that.
I'll work on it. In the end, it actually was an enormous satisfaction to walk into those rivers and pull out a few trophy fish without paying any money at all to the latter-day manservants that call themselves fishing guides. I did it MYSELF. I know that doing so is worth bricks of gold, and when and if I'm ready, I may try to help other people mint that gold, even though I have a sneaking suspicion that unless you figure it out for yourself you may end up with silver or bronze at best. Do it real DIY style, and you might end up with brown with black spots on it, one of the most beautiful materials known to this non-guiding, unguideable man.
