You can lead a fish to water.

We motored over to a weed line and started back trolling in eight feet of dark water. After two passes we had two nice walleyes and he said lets drop the anchor. Man he thought this was the spot and no matter how I tried to persuade him that it was better to keep moving, over moving walleyes, he wouldn’t listen. “Look, I paid for half a day” was the sentence, that made me drop the anchor.

For the remainder of the morning we caught one small smallmouth bass and seven perch. He knew beyond all logical reason if we sat there they would eventually swim by. We had two, that school will come back. Under my breath I thought yes Mr. your right, those walleyes will be back, but it will be tomorrow when I’m with another customer.

Roaming perch had plenty of time to nip at our anchored baits. The bass to me was a fluke. The walleyes were not anchored to the lake bottom like our baits and the back trolling that worked earlier made them snap at the minnows as we cruised the weed line. This guy was smarter than the fish, and he was much more intelligent than I was. Just be patient, I was told.

It’s an odd thing when someone hires you as a guide to take them fishing, sure enough they catch some fish, but then they guide, the guide, because as we all know, it’s the money, that’s doing most of the guiding.

The three strikes and your out rule, is one of my under the breath, keep it to myself techniques I have to employ on a rare basis but it works for me. After a trio of verbal suggestions on my part that perhaps we move after the fish or find some new Walter walleyes, to which he replied, “just sit tight and relax, you’ll see” I did just that.

By noon with the sun just toasting the insides of the boat, the dew was cooked off the lily. My guiding day was done. I felt bad that he only had two walleyes. I asked if he wanted to go pan fishing with me, for free. “Sure that would be nice”. So we hit a lake five miles down the same dusty road.

I get us all set up and have him cast his little bobber right over to a clump of large pond weeds. Bloop, the bobber lands, bobs maybe twice, and under it goes. He reels in a nice fat bluegill. I picked out a new set of weeds for him to cast to and he sez no, ill just fish right there where I caught the last one. I tried to tell him that just one weed patch, didn’t have lots of bull bluegills, but he was going to show me how wrong I really was. He did, I shouldn’t have taken him pan fishing for free.