Since my wife, Mary Ann, is a fly fishing guide, I hear a lot from her and her fellow guides about tips they do or don’t get from their clients they’ve taken on the river. Occasionally, they get no tip, and we all like to think that their clients just weren’t aware that tipping guides is a common practice in the fly fishing community. Other times, they get very nice tips for working hard to help make their clients day an enjoyable experience.
While this post has nothing to do with bamboo fly rods, I wanted to share a few aspects about “tipping your guide”. The fee you pay your outfitter/fly shop to hire a guide, somewhere between $400 and $550/day, does not all go to the guide. Actually, the guide usually gets paid about 50% of that fee, and the outfitter gets about 50%. The outfitter typically has costs for insurance, meals, permits, and flies, while the guide has costs like gas, guide insurance, and their own “special flies” that they tie themselves. The distribution of these costs vary from outfitter-to-outfitter, as well as state-to-state. The rule-of-thumb for tipping is to give somewhere between 10% and 20% of the total cost of your guided day if you feel your guide has worked hard and you’ve had a good day.
Your guides work very hard to make your day enjoyable. Their day usually starts an hour or two before they meet you to get setup for the day, and ends another hour or two after they drop you off back at the fly shop. So, the guide’s day is often 10 or 12 hours long. Sometimes fishing is slow and they have to work extra hard just to get you into a few fish. Other times, the fish just seem to “jump into your net” and the guide’s day is easier. But, their main goal is to make your day as enjoyable as possible, get you into fish, and pass on helpful information if you need it to improve your overall fly fishing skills. I recently read a great article in Mid-Current that talks about Tipping Your Guide. Check it out if you’re more interested at: http://midcurrent.com/experts/why-do-we-have-to-tip-guides/.
