One of the Missouri River's most respected guides quit nymphing; he's never been happier.
Mark Raisler probably knows the Missouri River near Craig, Montana better than you know your neighborhood. Mark can tell you why March browns only go off on certain banks (because the upstream substrate is mostly mud), exactly which insect a fish is feeding on by the way it rises, and if a trout is more likely to be a brown or a rainbow simply based on where it’s sitting. Mark and his business partner John Arnold co-founded Headhunters Fly Shop, one of the most respected shops in Montana—where fly shops are only outnumbered by bars and churches.
Back when the shop first opened, the Missouri was known as a dry fly destination river. People came there to fish dries, and that’s what Mark and John love to do.
“We opened the shop on dry fly stuff. I mean, the name is Headhunters. It's based on this epic dry fly fishery.”
Over the past couple of decades, however, nymphing has overtaken dry fly fishing. On any given day, the vast majority of boats will be chasing bobbers, even during the river’s most prolific hatches.
A few years ago, Mark wrote a guiding manifesto (published on the Headhunters website) articulating his fishing ethos and publicly declaring a few intentions. Those included eating more salads for lunch, having the client row for at least 15 minutes a day, and holding himself accountable to setting a positive example of outdoors stewardship through both his words and actions. He also etched a new rule for himself and his clients: no more nymphing. None. No bobbers in his boat. If you want to fish with Mark Raisler, you're fishing dry flies.
The Decision
For Mark, teaching has always been the most satisfying aspect of guiding. Over the years, he watched guide culture slouch toward numbers in the net over client development. Modern right-angle boat nymphing is extraordinarily effective. Anglers can catch staggering numbers of fish without ever learning other aspects of fly fishing he considers essential and enjoyable—casting, reading water, drift, failure. The guide rows. The client gets the line out, mends occasionally, sets the hook, and fights fish. Everyone goes home satisfied.
Almost everyone.
"I no longer wanted to fish for people," Mark says. "I did not want to be the guide that facilitates catching through non-action."
Though he’d been ruminating on making a change for a few years, one particular moment crystallized his decision.
He and a couple of clients had been having a good day, when one of them turned to Mark and said: Can we stop all this learning stuff and get back to the catching part?
Mark was stunned, but before he could respond, the man’s fishing partner offered a better come back than he ever could as the guide. Are you out of your [damn] mind, Bob? We already caught 30 trout. You don't even know what kind they were. Now you want to stop the learning [stuff]? Jesus, Bob, let’s learn for 10 minutes.
Mark never forgot either half of that exchange.
“That made me think I no longer wanted to be part of this guide culture that is so singularly focused on just catching fish.”
Not Hating on Nymphs
Make no mistake. Mark isn’t some elitist dry fly snob who looks down on people for the way they fish. He is now, and has always been, an iconoclast. Headhunters was founded on a countercultural pushback to the prim stuffiness that dominated fly fishing culture in the 80s and 90s. He’s making a personal decision about how he fishes, not vilifying nymphing in general.
"I make my mortgage payment on nymphs," he says. "Headhunters sells nymphs fifty to one over dry flies. All trout based shops run substantially on indicator fishing with some streamer junkies mixed in."
Mark isn't standing in judgment of anyone who fishes or guides with nymphs and indicators.
"No way," he says. "I wouldn't be half the dry fly guy I am today if I didn't spend 20 years nymphing. Nymphing is where you learn about depth and weeds and undulations and the bottom of the river. You can't skip that step if you want to know everything about a river."
What he objects to isn't the technique. It's what happens when fly fishing becomes transactional, when catching fish becomes the sole focus, and everything else disappears.
"I just dislike non-learning," he says. "I dislike the model where the only value is entertainment. No learning, only catching."
The Business Case for Dry Flies
You might interpret Mark's decision as the symbolic act of a veteran guide following his personal credo. That's not quite right. Mark thinks guides who never invest the time and energy to show their clients different aspects of fly fishing are short sighted. Fish counts vary. A river that produces eighty fish for a client one year might produce twenty the next, for reasons that have nothing to do with the guide. If catching fish is the only thing binding client to guide, the relationship is fragile.
"Not only are your guests going to get tired of catching a bunch of fish," Mark says, "but there's going to be a year where you only catch a third of the fish, and they'll think it's the guide's fault. But instead, it was just a regular fishing day. It's fishing."
The guides who survive long careers, in Mark's view, are the ones who give clients something richer than a number. "If you don't have anything else to bind you to your client, those could be five-year clients that have aged out. They've already caught enough." A client who embarks on a learning journey with their guide—to read water, cast accurately in wind, recognize a rising fish and present a fly to it—that client has reasons to come back that don't depend on any particular day's fish count.
"If you're looking for retention and developing long-term relationships, you better set out on a journey along with them,” Mark says. “I see these really, really great fishing guides that have been guiding for 20 or 30 years and haven't developed the clients as dry fly anglers, even in June and July [prime dry fly season]. That's not the client's fault. That's the guide's fault. If you do not play a role in your clients’ development, yeah, that's your fault. It’s your role to guide or develop or create or establish those goals."
The Resource
Mark raises one other consideration that guides rarely discuss publicly: the question of what sustained high-volume nymphing does to fish populations over time. Right-angle boat nymphing is efficient in ways that weren't possible a generation ago. Less skill is required. More fish are caught. The cumulative effect of that efficiency, across thousands of guided trips per season on a popular river, is something Mark thinks about.
“I do wonder what the impact will be, because we’ve gotten so good at catching fish in the past few years, and I don’t think we really know what impacts that will have on the fishery in the future.”
He doesn't frame it as a crisis. He frames it as an opportunity. Guides have the chance to determine what success looks like for their clients and balance that with the capacity of their rivers.
Setting Parameters
Mark didn't wake up one day and start a bobber fire in his back yard. He spent years building the relationships and the skills on both sides that would make the shift feel natural.
"I absolutely planned it," he says. "Over the last 10 years I've been working toward this, and I just simply told clients: next year I'm not going to nymph anymore. If you want to fish with me, we're going to dry fly fish or streamer fish or wander around and pick flowers. Whatever. No nymphs, no bobbers, no nothing."
His decision met minimal pushback. Most of his long-term clients were happy to go along with the program. The very few that weren’t stopped fishing with him, and he was fine with that.
Mark acknowledges his position of privilege. As a shop owner, he isn’t solely dependent on guiding to pay his bills. He also guides on the Missouri River, arguably the most consistent dry fly fishery on the planet. "I'm so fortunate to be here on the Missouri and able to do this. Some other resources wouldn't allow me the same leeway or opportunity." A guide on a river where dry fly fishing is realistic for only a few weeks a year would be facing a different equation.
But even though few guides can go dry or die and maintain a viable business, he thinks the principle applies broadly. "More people should put parameters on their guiding. Make yourself a personal mission statement. You should have some ethos. You should know what parameters you're going to operate within."
The Result
"I've never been happier with my guiding,” Mark says. “I'm excited every day.”
He contrasts this with how he occasionally felt before days with clients who only cared about numbers. "I got to get rid of the dread of standing in the shower for 30 minutes because I don't want to get out because I don't want to go nymphing because the people don't care about anything other than the number."
That's gone. In its place is something that looks a lot like the reason most people become fishing guides in the first place.
"I think I get to choose," he says. "At this stage of your career, you get to choose some of those things. And if you don't, they'll be chosen for you."