Marla Blair remembers the days in the early 1990s when she waded into the Farmington River in Barkhamsted, Conn., fly rod in hand.
“I didn’t see another woman on the river,” she said. “Guys would look at me like I had three heads.”
Fly-fishing has attracted a considerable number of women since then, and they no longer are a curiosity. In fact, women are so established in the sport they have reached critical mass in the once-virtually-all-male realm of fishing guides.
Notwithstanding a few raised eyebrows and the occasional skeptic, women guides over the past decade have quietly established themselves on many of the nation’s great fly-fishing waters.
Suddenly, it seems, women guides are everywhere. And business is good.
“I’m booked right now until August, and I only have another week and a half of days left in August, and a couple of days in September and October,” said Blair, who began guiding in 1993.
Marcia L. Foosaner of Palm City, Fla., set herself up as a saltwater guide eight years ago.
“I must admit when I first started, I was concerned that possibly no one would hire a `lady guide,’ but I have managed to become one of the busiest guides in town,” Foosaner said. “I don’t have a Web site, don’t do any advertising. It took me a year to get business cards. I am busier than I ever imagined I would be.”
No woman has presided in the Oval Office yet, and the number of female CEOs remains small. But there’s no glass ceiling over the rivers.
“There are more women [guides] for sure,” said Rachel Finn of Wilmington, N.Y., who guides in Alaska and New York’s Adirondack region. “In the past 15 years the sport has really opened up to everybody.”
Among newer guides is Sara Low, who lives in Providence, R.I., and guides in Connecticut and New York, her clients often drawn from Manhattan, where she created advertising campaigns for Broadway plays.
“I’d sneak out every now and then, waders in hand. They would look at me and roll their eyes,” she said of her former co-workers. “I had to feel the river between my toes.” She gave up advertising and set herself up as a guide three years ago, though she has been running fly-fishing trips and teaching fly-casting for 11 years.
Among her clients is Charles Warner of New York City, an instructor at the New School in Greenwich Village and an Internet entrepreneur who has hired four or five fly-fishing guides in recent years, all of them male except for Low.
“She has pants on and waders on. If her hair hadn’t been a little bit longer than the male guides … there was no difference. You wouldn’t know she was a female,” he said.
Five years ago, Amy Hazel was the only woman guide on the Deschutes River in Oregon, a river famous for its steelhead runs. Now there are several women guides on the river.
“I’ve had men tell me that they want me to take them out because if I can make it as a woman in this industry, I have to be 10 times better than the average guy,” she said. Hazel spent two years traveling the world in her late 20s, fly-fishing in 19 countries and on every continent but Antarctica.
Multiple skills needed
A fly-fishing guide must bring multiple skills to the job, including, most obviously, a knowledge of where the fish are likely to be found in rivers, lakes or coastal waters, and what fly they are likely to hit on a given day.
But guiding often involves some teaching, too, especially with neophytes.
A guide can point out how to improve a cast, where to cast, explain how to work the fly, how not to get a hook stuck in the ear. Knowing the knots fly-fishers use is essential, and a knowledge of how to fish safely is mandatory.
There is a right way and a wrong way to wade against a strong current, for example.
On a recent day, Jeffrey Friedman of Newton, N.H., was thigh-deep in the waters of the Farmington River. Blair, author of “Positive Fly-fishing,” a how-to guide, was at his side, her red hair flowing out from under her fishing hat as she sent a stream of advice Friedman’s way.
Suddenly a strike. Friedman lifted his rod sharply. Missed it. “Too hard,” Blair said. Moments later, a trout mouthed the fly, signaled by a little floating indicator on the line. “See! You had a hit. Did you see the movement?” Finally, a fish on. “Nice fish, dude.”
If it is true that women have more patience than men — there doesn’t seem to be a lot of debate about this — then women are ideal fly-fishing guides because the sport is not learned in a few hours. A beginning fly-caster can wrap himself or herself in a tangle of line over and over again before getting the technique down.
Patience is golden
Patience seems to be one reason a goodly number of men learning the sport turn to a woman guide.
“The women I have guided with typically have been more patient, and I like that,” Friedman said. “I think when you are fishing, if you are feeling self-conscious about maybe bothering someone who is impatient with you, you tighten up, you don’t fish as well, you get nervous. Marla doesn’t do that.”
Foosaner, in Florida, said she has heard the same thing.
“I think they feel a woman might be a little more understanding and patient with them,” she said. She has had male clients who’ve told her about male guides who became annoyed if they cast sloppily and scared off a fish.
“If I have a guy miss a fish, hey, there’s other fish out here,” she says.
Most if not all guides were drawn to the business at least in part because of the fun of fly-fishing itself, and its storied ability to relax people.
Selene Dumaine of Readfield, Maine, a guide in the western Maine mountains who also is an award-winning fly-tier, said she, like so many other men and women, was drawn to the sport by the 1992 movie, “A River Runs Through It.”
“I got out on the river, and it was the first time I ever felt I lost myself; I forgot everything else around me,” she said. “There was a real sense of renewal when I was done.” By 1998 she was a guide. She was eight months pregnant when she guided her first trip.
With few exceptions, there are no physical barriers for women guides. On the Deshutes and many western rivers, guides take clients downriver in drift boats, rowing and holding the boat in place while clients cast, which can be hard work.
“Where we are guiding can be physically demanding, not that women can’t do it,” Hazel said. “But rowing a drift boat with 400 to 600 pounds of weight in the front in clients takes a physically strong person.”
In salt water, where fish can sometimes run more than 40 pounds, and some species much more, the trick is having the proper equipment and knowing how to play and land a large fish, said Karen Kukolich, a saltwater guide on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where, she said, there are now double the number of women guides there were just a few years ago.
For the most part, women guides say they’ve encountered little or no resistance from potential male clients because of their sex.
“When I first started there was a little reluctance, kind of an old boy’s mentality, and a little skepticism,” Hazel said.
But she and other women guides say any skepticism typically vanishes when clients observe how confidently and assuredly they go about their business.
“Once a man who thinks he is something fantastic on the river sees an actual professional cast, I think it changes their tune pretty quickly,” she said. “I haven’t had any problems.”
