When the Year Ends
- Matt Martin
- 22 hours ago
- 6 min read
A Guide’s Last trip, Last cleanup, and the Long Slow Breath Before It All Begins Again
When you make your living on the water, you don’t measure your year by calendars or holidays or what month your phone says it is. Your season is marked by river temps, wind forecasts, sketch launches and the smell of wet neoprene drying in the back of the truck. It starts fast, ends faster, and somewhere in the middle you lose track of how many days have passed — only that you woke up, launched, fished hard, and got home in one piece.
Every spring I swear the season sneaks up on me. One minute I’m tinkering with the raft and checking bearings on the boat trailer, and the next I’m back on the water in late March, doing the long drives for weary steelhead and early-season Lake Ontario smallmouth. Long days, cold hands, and that first whiff of river mud thawing out. You know it’s time when the truck smells like wet waders...
And just like that, the year begins.
Spring — Steel, Bronze, and Pure Chaos
It starts with steelhead. Always steelhead.
Cold mornings in late March where you can see your breath hanging above the river like a fog bank while you rig rods in the pre dawn light. The fish aren’t energetic yet, not really, but guests are — and that’s half the fun. The drives are long, the winds are rough, and the fish are still shaking off winter, but when a tired chrome bar slides into the net on day one, it feels like a proper handshake with the season.
Then the general trout opener hits and everything changes. Steelhead drop back into the main stem rivers hungry, angry, and easier to find. Swinging flies in that season is magic. Watching a guest get smoked multiple times in a day — that’s the sort of thing you don’t forget. The laughter, the shock, the “Oh my God did that just happen?” moments… they’re fuel. They’re why I do this job.
But spring moves fast. One minute it’s steelhead and trout, the next it’s the pike opener and I’m glassing shallow water, hunting for big sunbathers. It’s like spotting gators — slow-moving, lazy monsters lying broadside in two feet of water. Some days it’s all flies. Other days a perfectly presented jerkbait does all the talking. I don’t discriminate. Neither do the fish.
Heat, Flats, and the Creatures of Summer
Right about the time you get comfortable with the shallow pike game, they move deeper, and the flats come alive with something completely different.
Gar.
Bowfin.
Carp.
The prehistoric summer parade.
It’s a riot — pushing the boat through water just deep enough to cover your boots, watching long shadows slide across the flats, and getting blown up by fish that look like something cooked up in an old biology lab. You cast cool flies, you get hard hits, and you take shots all day. It’s addictive, and I’ll die on that hill.
But lurking just beyond the flats is the annual gut-check: musky.
Early musky season is the closest thing to controlled insanity in guiding. They’re shallower, easier to predict, and every follow feels like someone plugged you into a generator. Finding them near spawning bays is usually the trick — toss big stuff at shallow structure, keep your head together, and hope your client doesn’t freeze when a fish the length of a hockey stick appears out of nowhere.
Then bass season arrives, and that’s when it feels like the marathon truly hits full stride.
From late June straight through until the leaves begin to turn, it’s nonstop on Georgian Bay. Bass everywhere. Fifty-fish days. Guests laughing, yelling, whooping as they boat fish on every tactic imaginable. Topwater, finesse plastics, crankbaits — pick one and go. That stretch of the year burns like rocket fuel. Every day disappears in a blur of bent rods, broken leaders, and sunscreen that never seems to stay where it’s supposed to.
And then — almost without warning — the days shorten, the wind stiffens, and I’m back in waders. Back chasing steelhead.
Fall steelheading is the beginning of the end, even in a good year. Mid-October to the end of December if the weather cooperates. It’s a long, cold stretch of big, hard-fighting fish that will humble the best of us. Swinging, drifting floats, casting hardware — they all work, and they all feel special. Every fish could be your last of the year. Every trip might be the one that gets iced out. You fish like time is running out, because it is.
What the Job Really Takes
Guiding isn’t just sunrises and grip-and-grins. It’s work. A lot of it.
Before the first client steps into the boat, the whole machine has to be ready:
· Boat cleaned, inspected, straps replaced, trailer lights working
· Gassed, serviced, stocked, rigged
· Time carved out — somehow — to scout pike before the opener
· Gear laid out, checked, reorganized
· And then? You go. Nonstop. Eight months.
Outside a couple of weeks with my family, I work six days a week. You settle into the go-go-go lifestyle or you drown. Alarm at 4 a.m., launch before sunrise, grind all day, get home late, clean the boat, organize gear, try to be a good dad, sleep, do it again.
Your hands crack and never heal. Hydration becomes a rumor. Your body is sore in ways you don’t talk about. And no one will ever stress you out the way you stress yourself out.
There’s weather anxiety.
Fish anxiety.
Guest-experience anxiety.
“What if the bite sucks tomorrow?” anxiety. No one is harder on a guide, than your guide, that’s the truth.
Some guests come with no experience yet expect fireworks on their first cast. Others oversell their skills — which never helps. I always try to ask for it straight: I need to know what I’m working with. I can teach you anything, but I can’t teach around pride.
Sometimes I wish folks would practice their fly casting between trips. It hurts watching someone blow the perfect shot because the cast falls apart. Same goes for hooksets. You’re 90% there — finish the job!
And then there are the moments that test your patience: rods broken for no reason, gear treated like it’s disposable, people who can’t slow down and let the process unfold. But that’s the trade. You roll with it.
Because the payoff is worth every bruise.
End of the Line — When Winter Finally Closes the Door
When the season finally sputters out, it feels wrong. Everything’s a mess — and it looks exactly like the inside of a guide’s brain after 200 days of work.
Fly boxes thinned and ragged.
Tackle trays in places they shouldn’t be.
Jerkbaits hiding in crankbait boxes.
Flies stuck in the boat carpet “drying” since July.
Topwaters rolling around the hatches like loose change.
Snow starts flying. Trips get cancelled because the rivers freeze solid or the forecast shows minus-10 and sideways wind. I spend hours over-communicating with guests — checking for frozen launches, checking flows, driving an hour just to put my actual eyes on the river the day before a booking.
Sometimes I make the call the night before:
“We’re cancelling. I’m so sorry.”
That’s money gone — deposits refunded, trips bumped to next year. It never gets easier.
And then the boat needs to be cleaned, winterized, and brought to storage… usually in the single frantic day I’ve got before the next storm hits. At this point, I’ve been in grind-mode so long that the idea of stopping feels almost dangerous.
Because here’s the truth nobody tells you:
When the season ends, you don’t just turn off the part of your brain that’s been firing since March.
You don’t slow down gracefully.
You crash.
Your body still wakes up at 4 a.m. even when you could sleep until seven. Your eyes pop open because you think you’ve slept in and are late for a launch. You’re ready for bed at 8 p.m. even though the offseason is the only time you can catch up with the people you love.
Stopping is hard. Maybe the hardest part of this whole job.
And Yet… I Miss It the Second It’s Gone
Eventually, though, the itch returns.
I start replacing gear.
Buying rods to replace the ones that didn’t survive.
Restocking flies.
Re-spooling lines.
Filing taxes.
Going over maps like I’m planning a NASA mission.
Thinking about new spots before the snow has even melted.
And somehow, despite the grind — despite the long days, the stress, the cracked hands, the dehydration, the broken gear, the pressure of making someone else’s day perfect — I love this job. More than I can explain.
I get tired. I get worn down. I get beat up.
But the second the season ends, I miss it like crazy.
Thank God spring is always just around the corner.
-Matt
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