2003–2014 · Why it ended
Coastal guiding
Twelve seasons, and the decision to stop.
“…time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within.”
Jim Harrison
Closed
The guiding services are closed. Short saltwater fly fishing workshops do still run, once a week from September through October — details and booking here.
Why it ended
I guided full time for twelve seasons and stopped after 2014. Two things ended it, and they were connected.
The first was the fish. The bass population across the locations the service depended on had visibly deteriorated. Without a general population of fish across a spread of marks, I was not prepared to keep accepting people as customers for guided bass fishing holidays. I could market the business all I liked, but I could not market fish that were not there.
The second was the arithmetic of the work itself. Guiding on this coast is severely seasonal, and it answers to the weather before it answers to anything else. Cash flow was unpredictable from one week to the next and never became the foundation I needed to provide for my family’s future. Twelve seasons in, with the fishing itself getting harder, that arithmetic stopped working.
It was with a large degree of sadness that I reached the decision to close the guiding services. The greatest job in the world is, done properly and in all its true aspects, also one of the most difficult.
What I took from it
I remember fondly from those intense, fantastic years — archived here — that when things are difficult in bass fishing it’s the smaller decisions and the unexpected surprises that carry it: the glimpse of a fish in a wave, the perfect cast into a gale, the surface strike in pouring rain. Moments of genuine satisfaction that make bass fishing the extraordinary pursuit that it is.
Don’t ever be fooled into thinking it’s easy. It’s not. If you know how to look, and if you like to wander and discover, the rewards on this coast are there to be found. That is what I had missed so much: the simple, personal coastal fishing experience.
If you, like me, prefer to learn the hard way — the best way, through personal time invested — and if you happen to like casting and swinging flies by the wind and waves at the coast, then perhaps I’ll see you out there. Who knows.
How the service was built and marketed is on Guiding for bass. The ecotourism thinking behind it is on Eco tourism & guiding.
Keep casting.
Jim
