A writer sent me a text the other day. I sent one back, told him I was on a guide trip and that I’d call him that evening. When we talked he seemed surprised that I was guiding, especially between tournaments. He asked me about guiding, why I did it.
My answer was a mix of the obvious and the not so obvious. First, of course, is that it gives me a little additional income. I’m new to this sport, and while I’ve been treated very well by professional bass fishing I’m not exactly getting rich. The extra money comes in handy.
It also gives me the opportunity to meet a lot of new people and help them catch a few big bass. I’ve been blessed during my life with a number of hawgs. That’s not true for a lot of other anglers. It’s a thrill to see the look on an angler’s face when they land their first 5-pounder. That’s especially true if the angler is a young man or woman.
That’s the money and fun side of it. There’s a professional side to it as well, and that’s just as important.
You’ll hear top anglers tell you over and over that there’s no substitute for time on the water. Truer words were never spoken. Learning to target fish is not a skill you can develop in front of a computer or in a classroom. Those things help but they don’t replace the real thing.
Being on the water every day is invaluable. Clients do not drive hundreds of miles and pay you money not to catch fish. Guiding forces you to think about what the fish are doing and what they are going to do that afternoon or in the morning. You learn to pay attention to everything that’s going on around you and to see and hear things other anglers miss.
Guiding also gives me the opportunity to try new lures and techniques. When you’re in a tournament you tend to go with what has worked for you in the past, whatever you have confidence in is what you’ll be fishing with most of the time.
But here on Lake Guntersville, where I live and work, it’s a little different. Guntersville is a super lake but it also gets a ton of pressure. Bass boats are everywhere and most of the anglers in them know how to fish for bass. As a consequence the bass get conditioned to lures and techniques real fast.
If you’re going to catch them day after day you have to constantly change things up so that what they’re seeing looks new to them. It’s a never-ending process. We learn, they learn. The umbrella rig is an example of what I’m talking about. At one time you could catch them all day long with it, but not anymore. The bites you get fishing it have really slowed down.
It’d be nice to just hang out and watch TV when I wasn’t competing but that’s not how things work in the real world. You’re either improving or you’re sliding backwards. Guiding is something that helps me improve.