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A Note on Guides and Guide Services. When it come to hiring a guide “caveat emptor”, or let the buyer beware. Fishing guides, like building contractors are licensed by the State of California, but unlike contractors there is no test, qualifications, or anything else required except writing a check for the license fee and all of a sudden you are a “licensed professional guide”. The Trout Fly Guide Service is in its 20th year of operation and our guides have on average more years experience guiding the Eastern Sierra than any other guide service. We have several master guides that each have well over twenty years experience guiding right here in the Eastern Sierra. Many guide services do not have that many years experience between their whole group. Nothing compares to years of experience. Our guide service is also the largest in the area. Large does not necessarily translate excellent. You can have as many guides as you want who only work a couple of days a week. The reason the Trout Fly Guide Service has grown over the years to be the largest is the demand for our guides. By mid-summer all fifteen are on the water daily and booked out long in advance. There is one reason - we have built a reputation of having some of the best teaching guides in the state. Catching fish is a given. Having our clients become better fishermen is our mission and is what drives that demand. What about FFF (Federation of Fly Fishers) casting instructor certification? Casting is obviously a big part of fly fishing and being able to cast better translates being a better angler. More than half our guides are FFF certified casting instructors and all of our guides are required to be working toward certification. If casting instruction is part of what you are looking for in a guide, we can deliver. All of our guides are also required to take classes and be certified in CPR and emergency first aid by the American Red Cross. What about a formal training program for guides? No other guide service in the area even has a formal training program to my knowledge, or for sure, in the realm of what it takes to become a Trout Fly guide. All of our guides have been to the Clearwater Guide School in northern California and several of our master guides have been instructors there over the years. It is no easy task becoming a Trout Fly guide - the standard is high. After demonstrating they are already “expert” fly fishermen and having graduated from the Clearwater Guide School, they must “pay their dues”. Paying their dues translates, first, working in the shop for a minimum of a full year and demonstrating that they have patience, empathy, and the ability to teach, traits that you are born with and cannot be taught. Next, a formal training program for every apprentice, which is conducted by our master guides. Most of our master guides came from the original Eastside Guide Service, unquestionably the finest group of guides ever to fish the Eastern Sierra. The “secret” to why that group was so good was that as they accepted a new member into the group, the new person was expeditiously brought up to the group’s level of expertise by on-the-job (or in this case, on-the-water) training. Half of the original Eastside Guide Service guides are still with the shop and now comprise a good part of our master guides. Today, we go through that same process, which we call “shadowing”. Each apprentice must shadow each of the master guides for no less than a total of twenty trips, where the apprentice goes along without pay and primarily just listens and learns, initially, and then starts doing the guiding with the master guide observing, and critiquing after the trip. The feedback from the apprentices is that the experience is probably very much like what a hotshot college football player goes through his first year on a professional football team – someone with lots of talent on a very steep learning curve finding out how little he really knows. When the shadowing process is completed, all the master guides grade the apprentice, and if they all concur the apprentice is “ready”, he then spends a day “guiding” our lead guide, Brad McFall, and is put through his paces. If Brad doesn’t feel the apprentice is up to par, in knowledge areas, like entomology, reading water and fly selection, skill levels like casting and line handling or people skills like handling a student that doesn’t listen or challenges what the guides advises, then he is assigned additional shadowing trips to further polish his skills. So, now that you have endured all of this lengthy discourse, I hope you are in a better position to evaluate the Trout Fly Guide Service versus some other options out there. This is certainly not to say there aren’t some other excellent, independent guides in the area, many of which have worked for the Trout Fly in the past and many of which still act as back-up guides when all of our guides are booked. We would be happy to refer you to some of them for a little comparison shopping. I can promise you one thing for sure – going into the tenth year I have owned the Trout Fly and Troutfitter, no one has ever contacted me to tell me they were dissatisfied with any Trout Fly guide trip. They say you can’t please all the people all the time, but that is our mission and so far we have managed to do just that. I’ll back that up with my word that if you book with us and you are dissatisfied, I will refund your money. Period. Old school - the customer is always right!
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| Call (760) 934-2517 for information and reservations |
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