There are many reasons why you should hire a guide

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Why Hire A Guide?

There are many reasons why you should hire a guide. If you are the assertive type, with an abundance of spare time on your hands, who would insist on going out to a remote area like the Boulder Mountain to explore on your own, hiring a guide may not be the way to go. If on the other hand, you are not the type that would just go wandering around in a very rugged wilderness setting like the Boulder Mountain, searching for remote lakes or hidden beaver ponds, then hiring a guide is definitely the better choice for you. The time factor alone should be reason enough.

The vast amount of time and immense level of energy it would take traveling the rough back roads and trails searching for the hidden lakes and beaver ponds, never knowing if your efforts will amount to anything but a wild goose chase should be enough to convince any reasonably sane person to hire a guide. Even if you were lucky enough to stumble upon one of the hidden jewels of Boulder Mountain, you still have to invest considerable time in trying to find out what the trout are feeding upon. While discovery is the very essence of this sport, and spending time attempting to figure out the complexities of new fly fishing destinations is just an integral component of fly fishing, it still takes a great deal of time. Time is what most people have the least of these days. If you do manage to find one of the remote lakes or beaver ponds on this mountain, where do you start? Where on these lakes or ponds should you fish? What about fly fishing equipment? Did you bring waders? Will you need a sinking line? A floating line? Did you even think to bring a net?

An experienced guide is knowledgeable about local streams and lakes. Matching the hatch is a fundamental part of fly fishing wherever you fish. A local guide who is on the water each and every day is confident and sure of what the trout are feeding upon. Not only does the guide know what the trout are taking on any given day, but at different times of the day.

Trout that are feeding heavily on a particular insect in the morning might suddenly turn off at midday. What do you do? It takes time to solve the match the hatch mystery on any of the streams or or remote lakes. Your guide has been fly fishing the local streams and the area lakes for many years and knows the timing of all local hatches.

For that reason alone it is very beneficial for you to have a guide standing next to you in the streams or at the lakes or beaver ponds. Tangled leaders are nearly as common as good casts for any novice fly fisher. It happens..... No sooner do you get your leader rebuilt.....and it happens again! The dreaded tangle. Your guide will teach you to tie the knots that are used in rebuilding your leader. A lesson in correcting your casting stroke will usually solve the tangled leader problem.

If you have ever had an aversion towards insects, that dislike for bugs will usually have a profound affect on how you fly fish. This attitude towards insects will manifest in your method of selecting a fly pattern. If you are not one for reaching into the ice cold water and grabbing a rock from the streambed to examine it for insects, or you wouldn't suddenly dive into a streamside bush to grab a crawling cicada to examine it or better yet, save the big insect in a plastic vial or case that you brought along just for such an occasion, then you are more than likely just casting whatever looks appealing to your eye and not necessarily what is appealing to the trout's eye.

What you may perceive as a nice looking pattern, the trout might see differently. Why cast mayfly patterns like the venerable Adams when golden stoneflies are flying clumsily back and forth across the stream in front of you? For example, these big stoneflies may not be on the wing at that moment. But if a quick look at a rock from the streambed shows they will soon be flying about, dead drifting a golden stone nymph just before and especially during this inevitable hatch is a sure bet for a big brown!

Many anglers will walk too quickly upstream casting frantically as they go, never really understanding what was going on with the trout that they walked over and a particular hatch that was just coming off or was even in full swing. Big bugs like golden stoneflies and salmonflies are very obvious and also a substantial morsel for a trout. They will aggressively chase your big stonefly nymph as it drifts, almost right up to your feet, sometimes grabbing it just as you begin your next cast.

Other insect hatches may be less obvious but are just as important. Your guide will show you how to determine the current hatch and which fly to use to match the hatch. The same is true about a lake or beaver pond. The trout in these places feed upon certain types of insects at specific times and under particular conditions. You may witness trout rising everywhere at one of these remote sub-alpine lakes, and try as you may, you cannot get them to take your fly! Testing one pattern after the other, failing to get a strike uses up a lot of time. There are often more than one type of insects hatching at once. What is happening below the surface, whether you are fishing a stream or still water, is just as important as what is happening on the surface.

The reasons for hiring a guide are numerous, extending far beyond entomology and casting lessons. Catching trout, big trout consistently on a fly is what your guide does every day. Teaching anglers how to build leaders and repair tippets is also what a guide does every day. Most experienced fly casters could still use a few pointers to help them correct a problem in their cast. Novice casters definitely need help to bring their cast to the next level. People who have never cast a fly rod would be lost without some help getting started. There is always going to be that learning curve whenever we try something new. Having a guide there to help you will shorten the learning curve considerably. If your plans involve exploring the rugged backcountry to flyfish one of the remote streams of the area, having a competent guide leading the way is much safer. When time is of the essence, and you want to learn where to go and how to do it, then hiring a guide is the economically sensible thing to do.

Call Steve Stoner at 1- 435-335-7306 Your call will always be returned

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