The following is excerpted from Dylan Tomine’s wonderful new book, Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman.
OK, I’m just going to come right out and say it: I sucked at guiding. Oh, my clients caught plenty of fish. But if I were a doctor, you might say I had a lousy bedside manner. Or what an old coach of mine often referred to as a “piss-poor attitude.” The fact is, I could never stop thinking about whether or not various clients deserved to catch fish just because they could afford to travel and stay at an expensive lodge. That, and I was frequently impatient. And sarcastic. And irritable. But enough about my good days. I guess I thought guiding was about fish, and it turns out it’s about people. No matter how dumb they might be.
LINK (via Adventure Journal)
Dragooned into guiding for a day here, a day there, for free (definitely a few less than 10 of them in a near-30 year period), by a lodge owner or local outfitter friend who’d found himself suddenly and desperately short of a guide owing to one of his team’s completely unannounced nervous breakdown or (possibly self-inflicted) near-fatal injury.
Let’s just say that on each and every memorably offbeat and highly entertaining occasion “my” visiting sport really really caught (and new methods and flies BIG, in the case of TDF & southern Patagonian sea-trout), but did, I was later told, require years of very expensive therapy afterwards.