My first time in Boise, visiting a lifelong friend, we hired Mike Raymondi to be our guide on the…read moreOwyhee River for a day of catch and release trout fishing. The three of us, retired women with modest fishing experience and a love for nature, instantly felt at ease as he selected the waders, boots and gear in the well-organized TRR store in Eagle ( when you go there, look up, you'll have a fish's point of view- watery blown glass ornaments suspended from the ceiling).
We followed Mike's truck to the river where he selected a sweet spot clear of snags and sunken hazards. The birds and awe-inspiring panoramic beauty made focusing on the orange indicator a bit of a challenge. Mike gave us a quick and articulate tutorial on casting, mending and setting the lines, then he spaced us out on the length of the river where he grew several sets of eyes, simultaneously guiding our line work and alerting us to the bobber's behavior, which you see before you feel anything. I missed several nibbles because I saw a tanager or a flicker, but we all hooked and I landed a big brown trout with lovely speckles and no wounds from the brief fight we had in reeling it in. The big takeaway about a good or bad day fishing, according to Mike, is this: hooking and landing combine a multitude of very different skills, and many people who say the fishing was bad, missed the nibble or the set, and failed to catch what fish were there. To me, there is no bad day of fishing if you are in the care of a competent guide, supplied with proper gear, a spectacular picnic lunch (kudos to Tasso in Eagle) and in an exceptionally beautiful piece of God's country, which was the case for us.
Now for those of you who believe the only value in fishing is catch, catch, catch, this review will mean nothing. Mike mustered all of his powers to switch out the types of nymph flies (we were nymphing this time), and we had a spare afternoon, but you can't make fish eat when they don't wish to. Nonetheless, we felt satisfied, happy and properly looked after by TRR's professional guide service.