My Guide Fee is Less...

 We were headed back in from a quick trip to the catfish hole. It was all the boys on board and we had dropped the girls and the kids at a lakeside playground with the instructions to be back, including travel time in one hour. We were barreling across the lake and arriving in the campground cove when a boat starts waving us down. We thought "motor trouble." It was a fancy rig with half a dozen people on board and an eye catching wrap on the hull. He had trouble alright.

It was a crappie guide boat. The guide, a white guy had 5 black customers, probably a family, booked for an outing.  As we pulled up he asked, "what kind of electronics do you have, mine are not working." Guides these days have something called live scope so you can see if the fish is there and go fish somewhere else if they are not. I replied that I just a had a standard old Hummingbird depth finder, not too fancy and he asked if I could located the Texas Parks and Wildlife fish reef sunk just inside the point coming out of the campground cove. I said I could. 

Actually my depth finder is pretty fancy and has more features than I use. In addition to showing the depth, temp and of course bottom features in several adjustable ways it makes GPS points. With the help of my engineer son, that's what it took, I downloaded the Texas Park reef way points on Lake Sam Rayburn to my desktop computer, put it on a mini card, inserted it in the depth finder and I have all the fish reefs on my lake marked. There are about four depending on my launch sport are near my usual fishing areas. Sure enough I led the guide right to the spot he was looking for. He threw out marker buoys and they began to fish.

I told his party as we cruised away my guide fees are cheap. After landing I could see the spot from camp and they fished awhile and then returned later to fish more. I don't know if they caught anything but the next day I took this photo as the guide was fishing the spot again. 

Crappie trips for four are usually in the neighborhood of $400. I know some guides include fish cleaning for a $1 a fish. Most of the time these guides build underwater brush piles to hold the fish and a limit for 4 people is 25 fish each. They get their limits so he makes $100 for cleaning fish. If I'm just filleting small fish vs cleaning cats 5 pounds and up I can clean a fish a minute. That's good wages. 

I've probably cleaned several hundred fish this year alone for free. It obvious I don't even know how to make money. 

By the way, we picked up the girls on time. 

   

DM me if you need fish cleaned.