Tag: New Zealand fly fishing

A Day In The Life Of A Fishing Guide, Act 1, Scene 327:

*Angler stands at river’s edge, excitedly hops from one foot to the other while the guide ties on what will be the first of fifty flies for the day*

Angler: “Gee, I wish I had your job.”

Guide: “Why’s that?”

Angler: “Well, you get paid to go fishing every day.”

*Guide reaches into boat for large club*

Living The Dream from Hayden Mellsop on Vimeo.

At this point in the conversation, I usually try to change the subject. As a guide, you fulfill many roles – relationship counselor, psychotherapist, babysitter, scapegoat, purveyor of wit, wisdom and one-liners – but rarely does personally catching fish make the job description. Rather you facilitate the interaction, row your ass off against the current for ten or fifteen miles, call strikes, untangle clusters, attempt to decipher Mother Nature and hope that at the end of the day the fish were reading from the same page and the tip fairy is out and about.

But every once in a while, you strike gold.

“Hayden, this is Fred. Fred is going to Alaska this summer, and wants to brush up on his rowing skills. You job is to fish, and fine tune his technique.”

So it was this particular day. My chance to not give a damn about body count, or when and where the hatch was coming off, or what the water temperature was, and do what I like to do – throw a dry fly hard against the bank and see what happens. And get paid for it. If that isn’t worth getting out of bed for, I don’t know what is.

By the end of the day, Fred was one tired puppy. Mind you, so was I. So tired, in fact, I broke down my rod and sat out the last mile or so of the float, content to watch the scenery go by, reflect on some of the fish caught, and look forward to a couple of cans of liquid Advil when I got back home. While my shoulders can handle the strain of pulling on oars for eight hours, casting a fly rod for that long is another matter. Frankly, I don’t know how some guys do it.

Clouds, sullen and grey, draped the mountains, and a cold wind blew upstream, carrying with it a few flakes of snow and the scent of more to come. The kind of morning made for lingering in bed, rather than standing at the put in questioning your clients’ sanity and cursing your own impoverishment in equal measure. Yet something in the air also held the promise of dry flies in the afternoon for those who persevered, and so it was to prove.

Floating on April Fools from Hayden Mellsop on Vimeo.

Satellite imaging tells us the Arkansas River historically flowed south into the Rio Grande before the uplift that created the Sangres diverted it east to the Mississippi at Big Bend. And this day, as the river turned there, so too did the weather, with the clouds lifting and the wind abating and losing much of its bite.

Woody Allen once opined that success in life is 80% just turning up, and so too it is with fishing. Get out there often enough, stay out there long enough, float enough miles, and sooner or later you’re bound to come across fish with their mouths open. The closer we floated to town, the more blue wings began to hatch to the surface, and the more fish began to rise to them. We were treated to a good three hours of dry fly action, before the clouds rolled in again, the temperature dropped and things shut down. All in all, not bad for a boat load of April fools.