Cecilia "Pudge" Kleinkauf is one of the best known women anglers in the U.S. She's been fly fishing for close to 30 years, and tying flies for nearly as long. She is the owner and head guide of Women’s Flyfishing® an instruction and guide service headquartered in Anchorage, Alaska. For the past twenty-four years her business has been introducing women to the sport of fly fishing and guiding small groups of women and couples to a wide variety of locations throughout Alaska for salmon, trout, char, Arctic grayling, and pike. She also leads groups in her off-season to Mexico for saltwater fly fishing and to Argentina. Pudge is the author of three books, and a contributing editor for Fish Alaska Magazine. She is on the pro staff of patagonia, Ross Reels, Scientific Angler, and others and is one of the founders of the International Women Fly Fishers.. Because we feel, as does Pudge, that it's high time there were more resources for women flyfishers, we are happy to offer this monthly column, authored by Pudge, exclusively for women (but guys might learn something, too!)
One of the questions that I get asked most often is, “When should I hire a guide?” Many people are hesitant to spend the money to hire a guide because they think that they should be able to take care of themselves on the water, or they just can’t justify spending money they think they should be spending on their family on guide services. Well, here are some good reasons to hire a guide.
Probably the best reason to hire a guide is to have her/him help you to learn new water. Over and over I see people decide to go fishing someplace they have never been before and think that they don’t need any help to fish that water successfully. Unfortunately, they usually end up not having nearly as good a time as they might have if they had hired a guide for even one-half a day to learn more about the fishery and the flies before striking out on their own. Just seeing what flies the guide uses and how s/he has the client fishing them will often teach someone a lot about a particular fishing location.
I think that the next-best reason to hire a guide is to learn new skills and new fishing techniques. Even if the fishery is one that an angler is familiar with, they are very often surprised at what they learn by seeing how an expert fishes the water and learning those techniques themselves. Again, even a half-day of guided fishing gives you a great opportunity to pick the brain of the guide and take advantage of their instruction. Many new fly fishers decide to use the services of a guide in order to build their skill level more quickly than they could by just fishing alone or with friends.
Many anglers tell me that they often go out with a guide in order to access water that may not be open to the general public. Some areas of a river system might only be available to guides who purchase the right to fish private water with their clients. Even though you won’t be able to access that water later without the guide, you’ll still get a chance to fish some new water on a river that you might otherwise think you know well.
Another reason to hire a guide is to access water that you might not be able to manage by yourself. That might be because you need a raft, when all you have is a drift boat, or, it might mean that you have to hike to a canyon and access the water by a difficult trail that you don’t know well, and don’t want to be on by yourself.
Lots of fly anglers “treat” themselves to a day or two of guided fishing each summer no matter how much they fish by themselves or with their friends. They just find that it is fun to be on the water with an expert, or to have someone else row so they don’t have to. Regardless of why you decide to hire a guide, my bet is that you’ll have an experience that you’ll want to repeat.
