Communicating With Your Guide (10 of 21)

Speaker 1: When you're fishing in a boat with a guide, whether it's a flat boat or a big offshore boat, you always want to be able to communicate both distance and direction. So direction, you use the points of the clock. Straight off the bow it's always 12:00. This way is always 9:00. This way is always 3:00, with the other points in between. So you both can communicate, you've got a relative frame of reference. The other thing you need to be able to communicate with your guide is distance. So what you do, is you make a cast that you think is, say, 40, 50 feet, whatever. Make a cast and say, "Okay, Greg, how long was that cast?"

Greg: 35 feet.

Speaker 1: 35 feet, Okay. It looks like 35 feet to me, so we're both in agreement. Now, when Greg says, "Bone fish at 11:00, 35 feet," I know it's going to be that length of line in that direction. The other thing you want to be able to do with your guide, to get a little bit more precise, is to point your rod at where you think the fish is, and you want to extend your arm and point right at where you think the fish is so the guide can see you. Guides almost always see fish before we do, because their eyes are better trained to spot fish, and they're usually higher up on a poling platform which allows them to see into the water better, especially at long distances.