Teaching the Guide

I have been a Fly Fishing guide for the last six years and I learn more about the sport from my clients than I could ever figure out myself. One of the most important lessons I have learned over and over again is what it means to be on the water. As a guide our primary focus is to put fish in the net for the client. This is very important, but for most clients is a secondary perk of the trip. This is especially true for people who are trying the sport for the first time. They are paying for an experience and for a guide and experienced fly fisherman it is easy to forget about the other aspects of a great fishing trip besides the number of fish caught. One of my favorite lines to clients when we reach the river is "welcome to my office", which I can take for granted some times. My clients always remind me how lucky I am to do this for a living when they do one of the most frustrating things for a guide and all beginners do this and you cannot blame them for it. When you are guiding someone you are constantly watching their indicator for any movement and when it does move and there is no reaction by the person you wonder why. I will look up and they are staring at the environment around them and you can't get mad because that is part of their experience. They are just happy to be on the water and I need to be reminded of the value of that from time to time. So thank you to everyone I have taken out recently for that.

As for the fishing, the Casselman river is done as far as trout fishing. When I was on the river last week there were few trout left and the harvest season had not even started yet. The Casselman does have a good population of rock bass and some nice smallmouth if you are looking for a place to fish for those species. A small streamer in crayfish colors will be your best fly to catch these fish. Hatches on the Savage this week can best be described as sporadic. Sulphurs and little yellow sallies account for the greatest volume, but there are still some March Browns and on cloudy days BWO's . I have had my best fishing recently with big sculpin imitations at low light in the morning and evening. The North Branch and the Youghiogheny were blown out for most of the week because of the rain that those watershed received, but hopefully I will have a report on them next week.