3 most common mistakes beginners make when fly fishing for bass | Guide Talk: with Bonner "Bones" Armbruster
Welcome to another installment of our Guide Talk series at Fly Life Media, where we dive deep into the experiences, tips, and stories of some of the best fly fishing guides around. Today, we're thrilled to feature Bonner "Bones" Armbruster, a seasoned guide with a profound passion for bass fishing. From his early days exploring the waters of San Marcos, Texas, to guiding clients on unforgettable bass adventures, Bones shares his journey, insights, and a few memorable tales from the river
Top 3 Tips for Beginners in Bass Fly Fishing
Master Casting Before Investing:
Spending money on rods before learning to cast is a common mistake. There's no substitute for practice, especially with a great instructor. A $1,200 rod won't help your distance if your loops are sloppy or your timing is off. Most casting instructors, like my buddy Austin Orr of Elevate Fly Casting, charge a reasonable fee relative to the cost of a guided trip and provide a service that will make everyone's time on the water more enjoyable - trust me!Focus on the Basics Before the Advanced Details:
Beginners often get overwhelmed by "advanced" details before mastering the basics. If you can throw a Clouser Minnow on a standard tapered leader 20 feet with any degree of accuracy, you can catch a bass, more than likely. Learn 3 knots until you can tie them with your eyes closed, and pick 3 flies to fish in different colors until you start to recognize some feeding patterns. Get familiar with one body of water, and then see how it differs from the next. There's almost too much information out there, but all that you really need to get started can be written on a single sheet of paper.Embrace the Fly Fishing Community:
Many beginners feel like fly fishing is an exclusive club to which they don't or can't belong. If you fish with a fly rod, you are a fly angler, period. We might not all go about it exactly the same way, but that keeps it interesting, if you let it. The exclusivity angle is mostly used by people looking to maximize profit or minimize the amount of "other" anglers they see on "their" waters. Sure, the learning curve can be steep and the gear can be expensive, but there are ways around all that, too. Get out there, find some fishable water, and go all out!
Get To Know Bonner "Bones" Armbruster
Q. Bones, what first drew you to fly fishing, and how did that initial spark evolve into a passion for targeting bass?
Bones: Well, I've loved, and I mean LOVED, fishing in general since I was a kid. Growing up in San Marcos, Texas, home of the spring-fed San Marcos River, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time on the water exploring. Fly fishing found me (through my buddy Graham Daly) after quite a few years of throwing conventional gear, and once I caught a good fish on a fly I tied, it was all over for the spinning rods, and I haven't looked back. Bass are the first fish I ever learned to target, and I still get excited to chase them every day, in all conditions, with anyone that shows an interest.
Q: How did you get into float fishing specifically for bass, and what do you find most exciting about this method?
Bones: Having walked and fished the banks of the San Marcos River since I was very young, I thought I knew it pretty well. Then my dad took me on a canoe trip when I was about 8, below the sections of water I was familiar with, and a whole new, wilder world opened up. I caught my first gar on that trip on a tiny spinning rod, and I thought it must have been some kind of river monster... After that, I knew there were entire sections of water waiting for anyone with a little initiative and a suitable watercraft. Once I moved back to San Marcos as an adult, I bought a small two-person pontoon raft and began the process of learning some farther-flung sections of the river I grew up on. Sharing these parts of the river with clients via raft (a newer, fancier one, of course) is ideal, because we can cover a fair amount of water in a day and target the most productive sections in comfort, from a stable platform that still allows us to portage as necessary. I also run an aluminum jet sled on the Lower Colorado River outside of Austin, and it's hard to beat the fun of running upriver over ultra-shallow gravel bars in the early mornings.
Q: What other species do you guide for, and how do you balance your guiding seasons throughout the year?
Bones: In addition to my bass trips, I spend a fair amount of time guiding saltwater trips for redfish (and bonus species) out of the Rockport area. There, I run a jet-drive skiff made by Black Duck Skiffs (also out of Rockport, by the way). On those trips, we run as far into the back lakes as we can... and sometimes farther than we should.
As for balance, I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea... if the work is there, I take it, and do what's required to prepare and execute to the best of my ability. One key to making this work is communication: when in the middle of a large run of work, I try to make sure that my wife, daughter, and I are on the same page. I also try to be as present as I can when I do get to be home and show them that I can put in work for and with them, outside of what I do for a paycheck. I suppose I have a hard time with the word "balance" in general because I feel it implies a sort of static, immobile centeredness. However, as anyone who has ever walked a slack-line knows, true balance is the result of a million small corrections, some of which run right up to the edge of loss of said balance. But we windmill our arms, lean hard in the direction we want to go, and somehow keep moving forward.
Q: How do you approach selecting the right flies when targeting bass in different Texas waters?
Bones: Visiting anglers are often surprised at the variety of water we have access to in Texas, and our fly selection reflects that. I own waaayyyyyy too many flies, but I use them all throughout the course of the season. I pay close attention to water temperature, clarity, and speed to help me make good decisions throughout the day. However, I also make note of what is going on in and around the water. For example, this summer has been milder than usual, and thus many of the smaller baitfish our bass eat aren't moving up onto shallow structure until after the first hour or two of daylight. If you look closely, you can see them start to stack up in the slightly-slack water on the downstream side of laydowns and rocks, and that's the zone when the magic can happen (with a well-placed cast, of course).
Q: What’s the biggest bass you’ve ever seen while guiding? Can you share that experience with us?
Bones: Honestly, I try not to get too caught up in the numbers game. Don't get me wrong, a large specimen of any species (especially our endemic Guadalupe Bass) gets me pumped up, but I rarely weigh a fish unless the client insists or I am looking to confirm that we are at or over a current water body record. Those fish get released, same as the others, and we go on about our day, no official paperwork involved. The biggest largemouth I have seen I caught while scouting with my bosses, Alvin and Lenee Dedeaux. We freaked out, took some photos, and then released it without involving a scale. I'll never know how much that fish weighed, and, to me, that's as it should be.
One other experience I would like to share, though, involves a species that's relatively rare to my home waters. I had a father/son duo aboard, and they were solid anglers, but the fishing just wasn't panning out despite good casts and about a dozen fly changes. Towards the end of the float, however, the son hooked up to something large that just absolutely dogged him on the bottom and wouldn't come up. I said, "It's a catfish, do you still want to land it?", even as I was hanging off the side of the raft, breaking branches out of the laydown the fish had dragged us into. As I got the final branch cleared and pulled on the leader, however, a silver shape began to roll upwards... and I then yelled "Holy sh*t, it's a STRIPER, GET THE NET!!!" The angler proceeded to land the fish as I hung halfway off the raft, and I learned not to make so many assumptions about what may lie below (especially since it turned out to be a hybrid striped bass, and not a true striper as I had initially thought, due to its size). To this day, I haven't seen evidence of a larger hybrid in that particular body of water.
Q: What does the future hold for you, Bones, and where do you plan on going next in your fly fishing journey?
Bones: I plan to keep guiding with the crew at All Water Guides, keep clients happy, and keep sharpening my own angling skills as new opportunities arise. I caught my first (and only) permit last year, and that has opened a whole new can of worms. There are so many fish, and there's so little time, really.
