Inside Angles: Guide and Client

It’s standard to tip guides for their services, beyond their base fee. A typical tip range, it seems to me, is from 10 to 20 percent of the base fee. The exact tip also is a matter of the quality of the guide’s services. Evaluating such services isn’t entirely subjective. Certainly, though, the tip amount shouldn’t hinge entirely on whether or not you catch a lot of fish—also shouldn’t necessarily depend on whether or not you catch the big fish you hoped for. That, even with the best of guides, is beyond absolute control.

You hire a guide for the potential of it all—hire him or her for their expertise in helping you, who knows little of the area or conditions (sometimes little of anything having to do with anything connected to the fishing), to get on fish without fishing each day the conditions the guide fishes, without, in essence, living the life the guide lives each of his or her many days on the water. Guides should be a pleasant and professional shortcut and learning experience.

This proposition is, in many senses, a difficult one for the guide. I have been hundreds of places on editorial and television shoots. These have been some of the best fishing places to be in the world. We do the homework and plan the best we can. Weather, always unpredictable, remains an overwhelming factor affecting the best plans. Sometimes it just doesn’t all quite connect. That’s fishing. That, too, is fishing with a guide.

Sometimes, too, you aren’t quite up to it all—don’t perform so well. Often you are new at this, after all. You haven’t ever seen a snook before. Haven’t ever tangled with a 5-pound smallmouth. Haven’t experienced a muskie following at boatside. Haven’t even experienced hours and hours of casting the big plugs that it sometimes takes. So you have a chance and don’t quite connect. That’s fishing. That’s not necessarily the guide’s fault.

Sometimes, too, though, the guide doesn’t quite connect for you, even when they honestly tries. There should be fish here—have been in the immediate past. But conditions change each day. The good guide anticipates that and has other options. But sometimes even the other options have changed. Even the best of the best anglers don’t always do well. That’s fishing. That, too, is fishing with a guide.

On another front, I have been with many guides, where I know more than they do, have had more experiences in a variety of situations than they have, yet rarely do I have a feeling for the immediate water so well as the guide. How does the guide react to practical suggestions at some point? Does it quickly become a matter of “guide knows” and “client couldn’t possibly?” It shouldn’t become an ego thing on either side. Overall, good guides faced with difficult conditions beyond their control still find a way to meld with you in an attempt to make the best of it all.

Beyond such subjectivity, was the furnished equipment (if you didn’t fish with your own) in good shape? Did you start on time? Things happen, but often it’s obvious when those “things” aren’t typical. A flat tire is a flat tire. The guide perhaps makes up the hour at the end of the day. The guide oversleeps. The guides makes up the hour at the end of the day. Maybe he forgoes the tip. Cuts the guide fee. Occasionally, though, (I have seen this at the dock) a guide arrives late and somehow it’s the world’s fault—and you get the feeling that somehow the clients are going to pay. Guiding is one of the most difficult businesses in the world if the guide insists. It can also be the best.

Burned-out guides. Guides who no longer like guiding but continue to guide anyway are just about as bad as it gets. The guide worked yesterday and the day before and 10 days before that. Well, that’s guiding. That’s up to the guide. That has nothing to do with you, and the guide should know that and greet you as though this is the best day of many best days of the rest of your lives.

You, on the other hand, do not, by token of your payment to a guide, have the right to treat the guide as hired help, much less a servant, or worse. You are a team for a day. The burned-out client can be as bad as the burned-out guide.

There is a special place in hell, I believe, for the bitchy guide. There’s nothing worse, especially nothing worse than one who runs a fishing session, which is supposed to be one of life’s gifts, like a football coach conducting linebacker drills.

A friend once cut an 8-hour trip short by 7 hours with a Florida Keys guide when the guide started barking at him for no other reason than that he’d hired him in the first place—he knew nothing of the situations involved and expected modest help, modest advice, instead of tacit belittling for what he couldn’t possibly already have known. Learning at the dock that my friend wouldn’t pay him one cent, the guide threatened some sort of legal pursuit to extract payment, whereupon my friend suggested a trip to the nearest small claims court, with the opportunity for the guide to pay him for his wasted time.

That’s as bad as it gets. With a little homework on your part, it should never have to get there. We have fished with or know many of the guides listed in our “Adventures” tips. In the end, though, it pays to ask for references and then touch base with them.

At its best, guide and client connect. The guide’s the expert they should be. Guide and client subsequently treat each other as the golden rule suggests. The guide works to get you on fish. You work to have fun. You both allow for the anticipated as well as the unanticipated. You each, in the end, go fishing, which, in the end, is much better than a business proposition, even when it is one.

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