Maine guides have an inside joke: What’s the difference between a Maine guide and a large cheese pizza? A large cheese pizza can feed a family of four.
It’s true. Trying to make a decent living as a Maine guide is tough business. It takes a Renaissance man or woman to make it all happen.
My grandfather, Bert Rafford, figured it out. He provided for five children and a wife through the Depression years. He guided anglers and hunters in the Aroostook River headwaters from 1900 to 1940. When he wasn’t guiding, he was the Masardis barber and a bootlegger. He gave heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey a haircut in 1924 and did six days in the county jail in 1904 for selling liquor without a license.
Masardis was a tough town before the war. A Presque Isle old-timer once told me that when the Masardis lumberjacks left the winter camps and returned home in the spring, the bears packed up and fled back into the woods.
My path to guiding didn’t resemble anything close to my grandfather’s experience. The biggest difference was that I was young and single.
I grew up listening to my father’s stories of polling his elderly father up the Aroostook River every May, filling the canoe with fiddleheads as they worked their way to Shephard Rips. They’d camp for the night, sleeping under an open-ended tarp with pungent smudge smoke drifting through to keep the blackflies at bay. In the morning, they’d fish their way downriver to Masardis, swinging wet and streamer flies for big squaretails.
Hearing those stories made me envious. I wanted to experience the rhythms of a Maine guide’s life.
My first paid guiding gig started in southern Chile in February 1994. I worked for round-trip airfare, room and board and tips. The lodge was part of a small cattle ranch near the Cisnes River valley. At the time, it was the only lodge on an 80-mile stretch of river.
The Cisnes was a classic freestone river with a low gradient, home to a healthy population of wild brown trout. The angling was weather dependent. Classic streamer fishing when it was overcast and raining, terrestrials on top when the sun came out.
When the dragonflies started flying, it was game on.
It was common to see large browns erupt from the water like a SpaceX rocket, snatching big dragonflies several feet in the air. By far the best terrestrial fishing came during the Cantaria beetle hatch. The Cantaria is a giant stag beetle, the males sporting huge mandibles. The hatch was cyclical, showing up every two to three years.
Part of the mating ritual involved massive swarms settling on a specific tree. They’d crawl around for a few days, then take flight. I stumbled onto one of those trees while fishing alone on a day off. The canopy hung over the river.
I quickly moved downstream and started fishing a big black foam beetle upstream. I slipped into a kind of fishing nirvana, hooking multiple fish and landing a half-dozen browns between 18 and 22 inches.
I returned to Maine in the spring of 1994 with $2,000 in my pocket. It wasn’t much, but it marked the beginning of 13 glorious years of spending part of every Maine winter in a trout-fishing paradise. More importantly, it answered how I was going to fill the black hole of Maine angling from January through April.
I made it back just in time to start running fly-fishing trips on a remote river system in Aroostook County. What’s not to like about big native squaretails, landlocked salmon and giant smallmouth bass, all caught on the fly and often in the same run?
Those trips took up most of May. Then it was on to chasing striped bass along the coast. I fished with clients from Cumberland Foreside to Maquoit Bay, often without seeing another angler.
When conditions were right, the fish would slide onto shallow mud and sand flats looking for prey. I added a poling platform to my boat, which gave me a much better vantage point to spot cruising fish. It wasn’t bonefishing, but it was as close as we could get in Maine.
My bass season ended by Oct. 1, which still left two to three months of downtime before heading south to Patagonia. I had to get busy. I had a new wife and a baby on the way.
The next several years were filled with whatever work fit around the guiding season: second shift at L.L. Bean during the holiday rush, delivering heating oil, running a Wood-Mizer portable bandsaw turning logs into lumber.
After several years of guiding for others in Chile, I struck out on my own. I found my sweet spot guiding out of a remote Chilean hot spring resort. The hotel had stunning panoramic views of Lago Puyehue and the Puyehue volcano.
I hired local boteros to float anglers down the Rio Gol Gol, which originated near the Argentine border and flowed into Lago Puyehue. We fished from traditional Chilean river boats — identical wooden rowing prams built for two, the guide and the angler.
Our days were spent floating the final seven miles before the river emptied into the lake, targeting resident brown trout and big migratory fish coming up to feed on puye minnows.
When we first started fishing the Gol Gol in the late 1990s, it was all traditional streamer fishing, identical to Maine tactics. Small baitfish patterns on sink-tip or full-sink lines. The fishing was always consistent, with plenty of action and browns up to five pounds not uncommon.
In 1999, I changed tactics after reading “Modern Streamers for Trophy Trout” by Kelly Galloup and Bob Linsenman. This Western-style approach relied on large flies fished with an aggressive strip.
Our anglers saw immediate improvement.
I landed my personal-best brown trout on a size 1/0 Double Bunny in 2007. Trevino, my botero, estimated it at 6 kilos, or 13 pounds.
A few years later, the Puyehue volcano erupted, flooding the valley with superheated ash and mud. The river was left devoid of aquatic life. Sixteen years later, the fishery has yet to recover.
My guiding career followed this pattern until 2008. The financial crisis put an end to selling expensive angling trips in Patagonia and took a big bite out of my summer striped bass bookings.
By then, we had three boys, ages 3 to 8. It was time to find dependable, year-round work.
Guiding will always be a lifestyle occupation. I was proud to have made it work for 13 years.
Our boys are grown now, with the youngest finishing college this May.
It’s time to get back into the game.
I bought a drift boat in Idaho last fall and plan to start guiding in Aroostook County in the spring of 2027.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
