It makes for a superb fish story, but as someone who’s had a similar experience, it’s the last thing expected and can certainly send an unwanted shudder through your frame.
Kid thinks he’s hooked fish, reels in human foot that comes off the hook just after it’s recognized, triggering search for remainder of body …
Nine hours later it’s revealed to be a Halloween prop, only the kid has emotional damage and swears off both Mickey Dee’s Fillet O’ fish and Tuna forever.
The trade magazines are busy writing odes to guides, how they’re an underappreciated yet potential sources of much retail trade, waiting to be exploited by a canny fly shop management team …
I wind up scratching my head a lot at the prospect, wondering how once per year makes for an indivisible instructional bond between client and guide – and why fly shops and fly clubs aren’t talked about in the same breath.
Then again, fly clubs and free instruction in nowhere near as sexy as being a qualified professional, and while I might agree that guides are troubled souls whose mettle has been tested countless times, whose heroism is worthy of a credential akin to an M.D, most are addled by too many blazing summer days with too little hat – to be the poster child that clients would want their daughters to marry …
These trade-centric pieces suggest guides are key to an untapped retail juggernaut, that can only be realized when vendors and larger industry players seek amends with red carpets and acres of free schwag. The instructional nature of the guide-client relationship and the sacred bond that forms being pointed out as an underutilized path to the client’s pocketbook.
I’ve worked with guides. Mostly making their life easy by fixing lunches and assisting clients, tying flies and making sure licenses were packed in wallets, and ensuring everyone knew where to be at what time …
… eventually I joined their ranks for a half dozen seasons, learning enough to be really impressed at the grueling schedules, the countless hours baking in hot sun, how picky fish can be when least expected, and how bone weary all that hard work can make a fellow. How they sustain an unending supply of good humor – despite pissed off clients, alcoholics masquerading as anglers, and tolerated all those sharp objects buried in their extremities while they taught clients to cast, set hook, and distinguish a mayfly from a caddis.
Only they never talked like those magazine articles said. They didn’t see themselves as the key to anyone’s retail ambition, and while they were partial to brands (as we all are) were respectful enough to suggest six that would work well, three the shop carried, ensuring the owning shop got its due, and the remainder available in the client’s hometown, should the client wish to spread the cash around. Despite their profession these fellows loved fishing, and the ability to fish for a living in a job that had both good and bad days, same as ours …
… only their office window beats ours all to hell.
I don’t think they were overly eager to exploit the client’s pocketbook even if they were a partial beneficiary. It was only one more thing to get in the way of the Experience – and even charging for extra flies was something the shop insisted on and most guides ignored. The best were still uncomfortable being tipped – yet gave us junior guides tips aplenty, “… you’re young still, stay in school and get a real job“… or … “get outta the business.”
Most were retirees, and had another sources of income given the surrounding areas were largely depressed, whose seasons made anything other than waiting table a six month career.
A destination fly shop has similar retail woes of its big city counterpart, and can reliably employ a couple of full time guide-contractors, but usually relies on a stable of part timers to flesh out their guide roster. Management is often reluctant to beatify guides – not because of their unwillingness to part with a dollar, but because guides are often unprofessional, two-faced, and an asset that shop owners often drink themselves to sleep over, something they’d just as soon not have to manage.
Issues with local talent versus imported “flatlanders” like college kids, most of which could care less about guide politics and would give an extremity just to be able to fish daily.
Issues with clients being a middle aged Big City professional and more at ease with someone of like background. Requiring shops to be on the lookout for non-partisan sophisticated talent, the piney woods being home to many woodsy characters, but not all were suitable for public display.
… especially with the high roller crowd – where shops often bent over backward to accommodate urbane clients, often bringing families, and insisting on a handler with similar tastes and education.
Client shenanigans are the source of the greatest tension, given their well meaning attempts to curry favor with guides often angers shop owners. Attempting to book directly with the guide on subsequent outings puts guide and shop owner at loggerheads, as the client was originally introduced via shop booking, and owners expect to see some loyalties or recognition of their drumming up that business in the first place.
Guides frequently run their own side businesses, using shops to flesh out the season with bookings during traditional woodsy holidays. Most feel that a booking via their phone service makes the client theirs – with no allegiances (or money) owed the originating shop.
Naturally, every owner is scratching his chin wondering whether all those shows and speaking engagements done during the winter, incurring all that travel and expense in an attempt to drum up business, might have limited returns given his guides may be siphoning his paying customers at the first available opportunity.
… and while he’s got no issues with cutting a guide in on the retail generated, is that street “two way” or is he really being played as a patsy?
Which is the real reason guides and shops have a sort of “don’t ask – don’t tell” relationship, and why owners are often perplexed as to their loyalties and relationships, guides being Ronin, Samurai for hire and fiercely independent.
And as I sat there wrapping sandwiches, listening to a parade of shop owners describe their on-again-off-again relationships with the local talent – it dawned on me why management was so interested in getting me trained and guiding. The owner need not fear me, I was only in it until I graduated, which meant I respected the client-shop relationship completely – I had no designs on leveraging it for my own ends.
Before owners and guides ascend any Golden Retail Staircase, they’ve got to define their relationship and the limitations each faces to ensure both exist for many seasons. As only when the suspicions ease, will both parties gain respect for each others needs and predicament.
… which isn’t likely anytime soon.
Orvis has pre-empted that instructional-bond with their Fly Fishing 101 classes. Each neophyte that breaks his wrist at the casting ponds will require twenty years before he’s sophisticated enough to want more than the Orvis catalog offers – and that’s pure retail gold.
It’s the casting classes and time at the ponds that equals the unbiased and unsolicited gear recommendation. Why the big named vendors have ignored the clubs and their organized public events is beyond my understanding. Local casting clubs see a multitude of visits from those interested in learning, where a guide sees a customer only rarely – and only if the water or access is scarce.
Disclaimer: This was not meant as an exhaustive treatise on the client, owner, guide, issue – only as a perspective on the relationships that I saw, and the issues I worked through while guiding for three destination shops. Guides work really hard and are deserved of accolades, but until they understand the shop ensures their mutual survival, there will be no rose petals cast before their feet. Your experiences may differ dramatically.
Remember that especially gentle and reassuring voice I used when I mentioned, “don’t fear dyeing your precious fur and fibers, as everything is useful for something …”
Boy was that a windy.
I’m pawing through a drawer full of goodies and see that dusty plastic bag scrunched under all that marabou, and naturally figured it had to be those long lost bucktails I simply knew I had …
Rather than the burst of bright colors I was expecting, I get the Color that Cannot be Used, a reminder of my greatest fur mistake …
I’d spent the better part of six months higrading all the shops in San Francisco for their best bucktails – each with hair damn near six inches long, as I was prepared to tie a big fistful of striper flies.
I needed a dark olive layer for the Anchovy imitation I had in mind and tossed three-quarters of those tails into the pot with a brand new dye and too much heat …
… which yielded shrunken pumpkin orange bucktail with olive tips. Twenty years later I’ve not found a use for a single hair – despite fishing fresh, salt, and everything in between.
I know. You’re sitting there saying, “CRAYfish …uhm, STONEfly dry …uhm, no …uhm, WAIT …”
Just like I did.
Given the volume of invasive species and how quickly they’re encroaching by both land and sea, at some point you throw up your hands and cease keeping score …
The Little Stinking just started its third dunking in raw herbicide for some 250 known outbreaks of intrusive grass. Its banks still covered with faux bamboo they attempted to eradicate last year, and the sprayed green outlines of the erosion preventing brush CalTrans introduced to protect overpasses that wound up enveloping the native fauna instead.
Reminiscent of some of the disarray shown in some conservation organization’s trout plants, wherein they wad rainbows or browns where Cutthroats and Brookies live … only to Rotenone everything year’s later in an attempt to restore native stocks.
So many self inflicted wounds and botched attempts at eradication that you can’t help but wonder, “… if you persist on doing this why am I supposed to drop everything and express outrage over something else that’s entered the country unbidden? …”
The herbicide sprayed around the creek to control plants is done so with no regard for water quality, and the green silhouettes of invasives left on the ground by overspray is testimony to what’ll be on the large sign telling me – were I pregnant I shouldn’t even be walking below the high water mark, let alone eat something from there.
It’s tough to imagine not doing anything about all of this, but as each government appointed czar tells me they’ve declared war on something smaller than me, I have to ask, “…is this to be a stand up fight or another bud hunt?”
Given the War on Drugs has been going for a couple of decades, and the effects are noticeable in most California neighborhoods. Before we had to walk to the street corner to score reefer – now the vendor is mid block, and a subsidiary of Wal-Mart.
… and with global warming in full swing and the Pristine slowly baking in slightly higher temperatures year after year, it really is no surprise that the Jewel of California, Lake Tahoe – issued yet another horrific finding, how they’ve discovered Smallmouth Bass in the lake.
That on the heels of finding almost everything else swimming in the slowly clouding SOB, including largemouth bass, invasive mussels, and Jimmy Hoffa.
Despite the Republican candidates insistence on clamping down on illegal aliens, I’m thinking most of the federal funding that’s aiding states in combating foreign biologics will be drying up soon. Victim of the trillions of dollars in cuts we’ll mandate as part of a balanced budget amendment or something similar.
Oddly enough a piece of me is beginning to think that may not be such a bad idea. We called ourselves “Native Sons” if we can trace our roots to the Revolutionary War, which at last count was only four or five generations from our current coddled flavor …
We may want to rethink all this costly suppression and just admit that anything we can’t eat to extinction is granted native status, making us and our declining environment all the hardier. All we’ll have to do is come to grips with Lahontan trout having ate all the Coelacanth, and what a shame that was.
We were always fighting symptoms rather than the problem anyways. The lack of a mid-Atlantic or mid-Pacific ballast purge ensures everything can get here quickly and with no ill effects, and with airline travel and pressurized cabins absent a placental barrier, it’s only a matter of time before each continent enjoys the same complement of “native” flora and fauna, thanks to the efficiency of the jet engine.
“Why, no. No problem at all, Mrs.. McGillicutty, you know how I adore looking after Froo-Froo. Yes, Ma’am, most men would consider it offputting to have to tote around a lap dog, rest assured I am secure in my masculinity …”
Society has all manner of non-complimentary names for it, but I like to think of it more as a form of regular opportunistic collecting …
Little Meat being key to that hobby, given his domain contains the Thanksgiving Tree, where 20-30 turkeys roost each evening, so close as to make a thrown tire iron a legitimate harvesting tool.
The downside being his bargaining skills and obsession with fast food, given that all evidence of the misdeed must be consumed or buried before his owner’s return … and yes, brushing his teeth is growing tiresome …
It’s increasingly important for us torturers of living creatures to live up to the collective Metrosexual expectation at work, given that we freely admit to sleeping on the ground, and consider bathing optional.
We’re like the city kid that bought his first four wheel drive vehicle, way down deep he knows it needs a deep mud puddle to gain legitimacy.
And while both Congress and our beloved President are lecturing us on the benefits of compromise, suggesting both Executive and Legislative branches could use a leavening of us compromise-prone sporting types, who dearly love those grandiose boasts at the water cooler, yet compromise so the Missus can share the same tent …
… when our real motive is to claim we rubbed ourselves down with greasy pork belly before chasing all them ravenous Grizzlies away from our trembling and fearful family.
It was them or me, so I kissed my wife goodbye then rubbed the bar on my nether regions and ran hell for leather at the biggest one, the one drooling the mostest …
As the only thing better than stretching the truth … is a complete outdoors falsehood involving loincloths, ravenous predators bigger than us, and a dull Buck knife.
It would be easier if fishermen actually liked eating fish, but most of you simply enjoy torturing them and put them back instead.
By doing so, the Federal government would like you to know you’re adding to the trade deficit, depriving the US of thousands of domestic jobs, as well as propagating the notion you’re a complete prick.
That’s because they mine your Facebook page and know you scored an exotic and imported Fillet O’ Fish on your return to civilization. Ignoring domestic fish flesh in favor of adding to the nearly insurmountable debt burden your children must assume …
… yes, the very same children that flipped you off when you inquired would any of them trade joystick for some mountain air that weekend …
The Obama administration is fast tracking approvals on our domestic waters for fish farming so we lower imports of those flaccid fillets in favor of growing our own – in the heady soup of nitrogenous fertilizers and female hormones that pour out of our coastal waterways.
Michael Rubino, who heads NOAA’s aquaculture program, said expanding the area where fish farming is allowed will boost production, create new jobs and help ease concerns that some imported seafood may be tainted with industrial wastes.
* snicker
Naturally it’s the Gulf of Mexico that’s the initial recipient. Converting all those idle oil platforms and out of work fishermen into pellet shoveling fish ranches, repopulating those empty miles of taint with genetically engineered freaks capable of reproduction without cell division …
Pump a couple gallons of crude off the bottom, scratch match, and Gortons can bring the refrigerator ship alongside and pack hell out of fish sticks – breaded or unleaded … whichever they’ve contracted for …
… and we can watch them help themselves to our tax dollars when the oxygen-deprived dead zone shifts their way and wipes out the fish, the sea lice, and anything else wet …
Outdoor Life taught them as did every hoary sporting rag stacked in the dentist’s office.
Mark Trail lectured us from the funny pages offering woodsy advice ranging from trapping and skinning the neighbor’s cat, to shelter and fire construction; yet despite all the accumulated lore and it’s many sources, you never passed on those skills for fear your kids would ignite the garage and hillside behind, and never realized that slapping snot out of Junior whenever he was in the same room with matches might make the poor lad a food group.
Instead, you left his education to me and mine …
Madison Avenue confused us all about the woods, equating skills and lore for carbon footprint and “green” – so you gifted the kid a Prius instead of teaching him which end of the match to scratch on the box. Now that “Lumpy” is at the mercy of the elements and unable to navigate a stack of scavenged timber and cold fire ring, have you given thought to your role in his lack of knowledge of the woods, and the paltry outdoor legacy you’ve left him?
He’s neither predator nor Hunter-Gatherer, he lies wide eyed under the stars fearful of every noise …
Somewhere among the countless hours of Babysitting via Nintendo should have been the audiobook for “Two Little Savages”, by Earnest Thompson Seaton, which would have been greeted by a curled upper lip, then hurled into some dark corner of the closet in disdain. Now that the manly arts and a cold fire pit are all that separates your seed from a hero’s welcome in the warmth of his hastily erected tent, at the bosom of Miss Impressionable Youth, whose physical attributes are rivaled only by a sofa cushion stuffed with marshmallows, whose starry eyes are only for you and the quickly congealing bag of fast food at your feet … and as them giggles slow you know all that’s required … the only thing necessary …
… is to light that log …
And after three days of watching the contents of a national park fumble with matches, showers, uprooting trail signs to burn, keeping themselves fed and the pursuit of relaxation, I can honestly say we’ve no longer got to conserve anything, if we can just keep a couple of fish wet past this generation, we’re good … live humans won’t exist in woods much longer.
I can’t say us trained woodsmen are faring much better, or at least the California contingent of that fast disappearing lot. While the campground host greeted us like long lost relatives, knowing he could count on us sharing woodsy niceties like firewood and a dry match, it didn’t leave much time for chasing fish – given the number of tourniquets applied, knives and spoons loaned, and terraforming necessary to keep the closet cabins from cannibalism.
We pirouetted like gazelles in the lake, righting sunken kayaks and rescuing drowning children, while munching on canapés and Korean Seaweed dusted with Wasabi powder, a Californio woodsy tradition. We counseled the untrained on the merits of going without showers, and how the “five minute rule” for dropped food goes double in the woods.
What with our Registered Professional Forester bringing two year old kiln dried Walnut to burn, aged Scotch, bathtub Gin, and 8 flavors of beer, and our private Chef smuggling Sweet & Sour Stew and homemade Oatmeal Raisin cookies, accented by gourmet space food whose bags contained pellets of C-4, that would ignite and heat the meal merely by rubbing the wrappers together …
Suddenly, the outdoors is cool again, and as Miss Impressionable quits her stream of complaints, as youth no longer needs coaxing to take part.
Unfortunately it’s too late, the great adventure never to be repeated, your child’s grandiose plans of seduction and heroism dashed against cold granite, and colder womenfolk, and his next conquest will be at the beach. Which is every bit as cold as the woods, but he’s forgotten his earlier defeat based on the gal he’s spied in #14, and the arms folded harrumph he’s getting from what was once your daughter in law.
White bread has also been commonly used as a hook-bait for centuries and is even referenced in the fisherman’s Bible The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton in 1653.
It’s well known that successive generations of anglers have lowered their expectations over the outdoor experience and game fish in general. As our beloved quarry is diminished in both size and numbers, we’ve been forced to ignore those qualities that made them great, and widen the available prey by adding the less genteel and outright untouchable into the game fish ranks.
Magazines that once talked about fish as, “…like a startled silvery gazelle, spinning in midair …” now rarely mention anything other than “wallow” , “snag” or “slugfest.”
With dams as plentiful as instream cobble, our once agile opponent has become some panting porcine slob that comes to heel when we whistle, disgorges its most recent meal into our palm from overexertion, poses for the camera in familiar “Gasping Fatty” cover pose, and must be coaxed back into the water. A far cry from our father’s “silvery greyhound – product of thousands of generations fighting miles of uphill currents.“
Sure it’s our doing. Ensuring the genetics of those lean and muscular fish are no longer viable, via selection for fish small enough to negotiate a live turbine – or fat enough to maintain their place without swimming.
Reducing our beloved sport to releasing some bloated softbody that eats your fly hoping you’ll shove its flaccid ass a bit further upstream, clearing some shallow spot blocking its next meal ..
The Bad News is that in addition to selecting fish whose belly drips through all but clenched fingers, you’ve imprinted your eating habits on young and impressionable game fish, whose biopsies suggest that Type II Diabetes in fresh and salt water fish roughly mirrors the human populations nearby.
… your midday meal being such a nutritional wasteland that it’s a toss up whether your lunch provides the bare necessities to keep you alive – or whether your wife packed it with every intention of killing you dead.
If you had any sense, the thought should give them jaws pause. If the fish shouldn’t eat it there’s little doubt that you’re destined for a fiber-less haymaker delivered to the knotted remnants of your colon.
Hard to believe that in a couple hundred short years, we’ve destroyed most of the known fisheries, and corrupted even the bait used to tame all that Wilderness.
Taking all that DNA sequencing out of the crime lab and aiming it at your meat counter suggests that nearly 25% of prepared fish in meat counters are mislabeled. Steaks and fillets often lack scales fins or identifying features which allows a cheap freshwater catfish to substitute for a higher end cod.
… and earning perhaps the greatest nickname ever, our lowly farmed tilapia gets its due ..
Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi. Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role.
Naturally the FDA will make every attempt to crack down on the practice.
… when it suits them.