Search Month: April 2024

My friends join me for a tough discussion. What are the benefits of guiding? What are the good things? How does it help anglers? Does it actually help people and make our sport or this fishing scene better, or does it just put money in the guide’s pocket and put more pressure on the trout?

For a moment, let’s consider where the line goes when the hookset doesn’t stick a trout . . .

You strike on the rise and miss a fish. Or, while nymphing, you set when the fly bumps a rock for the forty-fifth time. And the fly goes where?

In wide open meadows and valleys, who cares? With no trees to eat your fly, sloppy hooksets go unpunished. But the rivers I frequent harbor broken tree limbs as earnest gatekeepers. I like dark, shady corners because the trout do. And working around these obstacles forces me to be mindful — to know where every hookset finishes . . .

The lost friendship transforms a river bend — that one with the ancient and hollowed-out sycamore — into an active tombstone. The towering tree with the undercut bank becomes a place to remember shared moments of casting into cool waters, where the ghosts of laughter and fond companionship persists.

We consider the full life cycle of a caddis: the pre-hatch, the emergence, the egg laying phase and death. And at each of those stages, we ask what the bugs are doing, how the trout respond and how we can imitate the bugs to fool a trout.