At Issue: Paying for it
Article by Ray Helaers

         Some anglers will never pay to fish. They're against it. They can get their own, thank you very much, and they won't hire guides, stay in lodges, or pay to fish private water. Fair enough, I guess. A lot of anglers can't afford it, and so have no opinion. Most of us have no problem with it, and can sort of afford it, so we do it. On the other hand, we don't have money to burn exactly, so we do it rarely. Then there are chaps who never fish without writing somebody a check for something.
         These are the guys who maybe fish a dozen days a year, but always in some place like Belize for Permit, Arctic Russia for Atlantics, Alaska, or maybe a quick weekend in Montana, everything always first class. I like looking at the catalogs for those places; all the Sports are in their fifties and sixties, all the wives and girlfriends in their twenties and thirties. There's trophy fishing and then there's trophy fishing.
         You have to wonder about those guys. They're in the best places, fishing for the best fish, with the best equipment, and alongside the best anglers, but they can only fish with a guide's help. I mean, who wants to be the dude? Of course most of these swells would never think of themselves that way. They're paying; they're the boss.
         I know guys who have guided at some of the top dollar lodges in Bristol Bay and Kamchatka. They say that most of the sports are of course wealthy, and for the most part pleasant (after all, they're on vacation), and some of them can even fish. But every once in a while, some client feels it necessary to remind his guide that he is "the help." Apparently it can be nasty.
         "They can be very good at making you feel like shit," one friend told me.
         I don't even know anybody like that. For me and everybody I know, a big trip usually means a cheap motel on a do-it-yourselfer to the Olympic Peninsula, or the upper Skeena drainage, or southern Idaho. Paying for it means hiring a guide, or once in a blue moon fishing some private water.
         Given my admittedly modest scale, I do have to say that I've never regretted spending money to fish. Every time I've hired a guide or fished a private lake, I caught a bunch of fish and had a great time. I'm sure if I had more money and spent it more freely, I'd wind up eventually paying for a bad trip, but so far I've been lucky.
         The first time I ever hired a guide was on the San Juan River in northern New Mexico. I was in the Southwest for a family reunion, and taking ten days to drive around Colorado and New Mexico in a rented car with Susie. I made myself one day to fish the San Juan. The river is one of the West's most famous trophy trout factories, and I didn't want to take any chances.
My brother drove out from San Diego for the reunion and met us at the little cinder block motel on the river. He had never flyfished before, and in the morning I was giving him casting lessons when the guide arrived to pick us up.
         The San Juan is a tail race below the Navajo Dam, a bottom draw, two hundred foot high red earth berm that creates what is essentially a gigantic artificial spring creek. The water, is slow, cold, and rich, full of weeds and bugs. It grows big fat trout in a hurry. The guide parked under the dam and we hiked through a wide jungle of willows and reeds before we reached the water. He rigged us up with tiny midge larvae imitations, a couple split shots, and strike indicators.
         "Cast right there," he said, indicating a rut in the weeds.
         I did what he said. Within a few seconds, a five pound rainbow was rushing away from me, my reel purring. It was the first time I ever saw my flyline backing going away.
He caught us fourteen or so more that day. Jack, who had never even held a fly rod before, landed six or seven, most right around five pounds. The guide knew his stuff, and he was courteous and helpful, tying on all our flies, netting our fish, running back into the willows to unhook us when we fouled our backcasts. It was a little like having a caddie. He only gave me a little attitude, when we were fishing dries in the afternoon and I was having trouble seeing the size 22 black midges we were throwing. But we got over that hump when on the one drift I could see, another five pounder rose to examine my fly, and turned downstream with it before sipping it in.
         That seems like the smartest way to spend your money on a guide: a river you've never seen before and may never fish again, especially when you only have one day. Great trout water is rarely easy water. A few days earlier, I fished the South Platte River outside Denver, another stream famously filled with a lot of big trout. They were there; I saw them. They skunked me good. In the course of the day I did manage to learn some things about the river that I'll never get to use.
         But that's really the second best use of a guide. Some years ago, I hired a guide to float me down the Yakima River, the closest thing I have to home water. I learned more about the river in that one day than I had fishing it by myself for four seasons. In the long run, on water you plan on living with, a guide might actually save you money, certainly time and frustration.
Then there's the private, so called pay-to-play water. Most of these things are lakes, though there are some private spring creeks too, most famously in Montana. Some of the lakes offer camping or lodging, in some cases very nice lodging. It can be expensive, and worth it. Some of the better known private lakes, like at Douglas Lake Ranch in BC, or Grindstone Lake in Oregon, have reputations for putting out lots of ten pound trout. They put you up in first class accommodations, and let you fish all day, but it can cost upwards of two to three hundred bucks a day. For what you get, it's not that bad if you've got it.
         The smaller day fisheries that are spread throughout the Northwest usually run around a hundred a day, just to have someone open the gate for you. You bring your own float tube, your own tackle, flies and lunch. You may or may not be guided, but it's usually not necessary. The one thing they all have in common is a lot of big fish.
         I've only done this a couple times. Twice at a little day pond near Seattle, and once at a larger lake in eastern Washington that provided accommodations. Again, it was all money well spent.
         Dream Lake is in Snohomish, about an hour north of Seattle. It's only about five acres, and stiff with fat trout, rainbows and a few cutts. I mean really fat, upwards of ten, twelve pounds. I fished it once in winter and once in early spring and both times caught bigger trout than I've ever seen anywhere else.
         Hudson Springs Lake is bigger, but still small, about thirty acres, in the bottom of a little coulee east of Ephrata. A lot of the day lakes aren't very pretty, but Hudson Springs is nice. It has a lot of sixteen to twenty inch rainbows, which you don't have to pay for in eastern Washington, but a lot of five to ten pounders as well, which are few and far between on public water, just about anywhere.
         In Dream Lake, Hudson Springs, and all the pay lakes, the big fish are there because somebody put them there, which gives the whole enterprise a certain fish in a barrel aspect, particularly on the small water. It's amazing how that feeling goes away when your flyline is absolutely rigid, shearing away from you with a little triangle of water standing behind it, making a noise like somebody pulling a broomstick through the water.
         It does make me qualify things, though. The biggest trout I ever landed was at Dream Lake, about eight pounds. But it doesn't count as much as the four and a half pounder I took one evening at Chopaka, without anybody's help. I'm no dude, after all. Of course that fish had been stocked as a fingerling by WDFW, supported in part with my license fees. You get what you pay for, I guess.