Quote:
Originally posted by Bob:
Actually Renyees ... maybe you can help me smile

You sent in this report for 1/22 (yesterday) about the same time you registered:

Quote:
Fished the Lower Hoh today nailed a 7 pound dollie on the 3rd cast. Also nailed 2 steelies on of 18 and on 14 big native bucks. Fished the Sol Duc yesterday. Hit 3 fish landed 2 one a teener hatchery the other a 15 pound nate hen. I let it go. Let go the native hens everybody!!
Perhaps you can share your secrets of how to have such great day of fishing on a day the lower Hoh came up over two feet during the daylight hours?? I'd sure have to think those slides caused some vis problems with that much rise?? wink

Bob-Sorry I don't know how that happenned. It was actually my buddy who posted that. He said he caught the fish pretty early but i have no clue what he was using. he said he had to get out of there of fear or getting stuck on the sand bar he was on.
On the fishing end of guiding ... that's important ... maybe you got it!! Ya gotta be able to help your guests produce all the time, even under some of the worst conditions!

Insurance nowadays wil be between $1000-$2000 annually based on what / where you run. The state of Washington doesn't require it, but you'd be stupid to work without it.

Might be kinda tough to do with school ... you'll find that your day is hardly over when you get off the river. This time of year, I'm up at 4:30 for a 5:30 meet, usually fish until 3:30 or so ... and I usually get all the chores done about 8 or 9 in the evening. So that's about 16 hours/day in the winter. My summer hours are far worse ... especially when I run double trips.

Chores?? Yep, after you get home: you wash the boat, check all equipment, fix / swap out what is necessary, tie leaders if you haven't already spent all your days off getting them ready, get coffee ready for next day's client's thermos, check in with your group for two days out, field phone calls or emails for prospective trips, talk with other guides / anglers to get an idea of what is happening in the areas you did not fish today, have a little time set aside to play politics & conservation, have a little time set aside for accounting puropses ... oops, the Visa machine ran out of paper again, do your best to decipher weather forecasts so that your clients don't drive out unnecessarily, run down and check the ramp again to see just how much the river is coloring despite what the gauge on the web says, oh damn!, I forgot to grab shrimp on my way home, run back up town to grab shrimp for tomorrow, might as well get some gas too! You wake up in the morning and see that rain turned to snow and now you have 3" of wet sloppy stuff covering everything in the boat ... run outside in your PJ's and try to get a hose running on it to melt the snow the best you can, then you realize clients got drunk last night are are way late for breakfast so you start hunting them down at the local motel, you finally get them out to the river and are excited for a great day of fishing as they told you that they're gonna be easy to fish because they've done lots of this before ... the client then proceeds to take the spinning rod you gave him (the days of plugging all day are long gone smile fires one into the trees, you give 'em another ... decent cast this time, but now he starts reeling up with the spinning reel facing the sky ... oh my we have our work cut out for us today smile

BUT when you see the smile and twinkle in their eye whe they are succesful, it makes it all worth it!! You gotta ask yourself if the end reward outweighs the rest of it? Did they learn something today, did they get to see something they never have before?

Lots of of people have tried guiding (someone other than family / friends) and realized that it was far from what they expected.

Long hours, so-so pay for those that work really hard at it, lousy pay for those that don't ... it's not just going out fishing for a few hours each day!

Some may ask why then??

Good question, perhaps best answered by another question ... why would anybody in their right mind fish for winter steelhead anyhow laugh