Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 672 with Guy Jeans, owner of the Kern River Fly Shop and longtime musician. This transcript has been lightly cleaned and organized from the original episode audio for readability.

Meet Guy Jeans and the Kern River Fly Shop

Tom Rowland: Guy Jeans, how's it going, man?

Guy Jeans: It's going good. Stoked to be on your show, man. Thanks for having me.

Tom Rowland: I appreciate it. It's funny, I don't know if we've ever actually met in person, or if we have it's been quite some time, but we run in a lot of the same circles. We have a lot of the same friends, and we've been to a lot of the same shows.

Guy Jeans: Yeah, I know you've been into competition in the past, and same with me, and I don't think we've ever actually run into each other that way.

Tom Rowland: No. It's interesting, because reading your bio, in this sport of fishing it's a lifetime pursuit. You can do all kinds of things, and when you get into the competitive world you start getting into different nuances and styles. I started down a similar road with competitive fly fishing. I did the ESPN Great Outdoor Games a couple of times, and then I just kind of went to saltwater. I knew about the U.S. national team and it was interesting to me, but I started spending less time out West and more time in Key West, which is different from you and my friend Pete Erickson, who I know you competed with. Tell me about the Kern River Fly Shop and what you've got going on there, because I don't know much about the Kern River. I'm not a California guy, but it seems like you've got an interesting mix of warm water and cool water fishing.

Guy Jeans: It's been twenty years now. I admire you as an entrepreneur too, because that's exactly what I am as well. I was a musician for many years, playing in a ska band called the Stoneflies, which I still play in a little bit here and there. My music career was taking a bit of a different turn, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I grew up in Ventura, and there's a river about three hours away called the Kern River. A buddy of mine told me I had to go check it out. I drove up, fell in love with the place, and fished it for years. It has a real variety of species you can catch. Eventually I decided I was going to start a fly shop, and I just went for it with total tunnel vision. People told me I shouldn't do it, that I was going to lose my shirt, and I just didn't listen. At the time I was playing jazz piano gigs in Ventura with a saxophone player, then I'd drive three hours up to the Kern, guide, sleep in the back of my truck, and drive home. After a while I thought I might actually be able to pull this off. One day, driving back from guiding, I saw a for-rent sign on a building in Kernville that had been a thrift store for thirty years. I called the number, and the owners had no idea what fly fishing even was. There was no fly shop in the town of Kernville. I asked if I could come to their house and show them something, and I basically did a sales presentation on fly fishing right there, bringing over flies and gear to show them what I did. A couple weeks later they gave me the lease. It took about a year to get the shop stocked and built out, and I opened twenty years ago. It's been a really cool ride since then, and I've met some of my best friends through fly fishing. It's not a giant shop, but I've got guides working for me now who are doing really well. We guide the Upper Kern, which runs about seventy miles, out of a Kern River system that's about a hundred and fifty miles long total. What we're known for is the Kern River rainbow, a California native species, and the golden trout, which is California's state freshwater fish. People come from all over to catch one.

Tom Rowland: Are the golden trout in the river itself?

Guy Jeans: They are, in the South Fork of the Kern. That's another piece of the puzzle here. The South Fork has goldens and browns. The North Fork has rainbows and browns. The Lower Kern has smallmouth and largemouth bass, plus trout, and smallmouth is my favorite. We've also got Lake Isabella, which has an amazing carp fishery. We just had a big carp fly fishing tournament this past Saturday.

Chasing Carp on the Kern

Tom Rowland: That's really taken off, hasn't it, the carp fishing?

Guy Jeans: Everybody's come out of the closet about carp fishing out here.

Tom Rowland: The carp fights harder than almost anything else you mentioned. It's incredibly popular in England and Europe. My sister lives over there and sent me some angling magazines that were basically wall-to-wall carp coverage. They can be really hard to catch, and they haven't quite been embraced here the way they are over there, but I don't know why, because they fight harder than almost anything. They're very similar to redfish in how they feed, and people love redfish. I like anything that bites.

Guy Jeans: I'm with you on that. It's funny, I just went to Mexico and fished for permit and bonefish, which was a blast, but the bonefish were actually pretty easy to catch, really on the chew. When I got back I told people, if you can catch a carp, you'll have no problem catching a bonefish. The carp here are just genuinely difficult.

Tom Rowland: How do you fish for them in your area, and what are they eating?

Guy Jeans: We mostly target common carp. They mud and they tail, but they'll also eat off the surface during our grasshopper, ant, and beetle hatches, which is a lot of fun. This past weekend they were mudding and tailing, so we used a fly we developed called the Carpalicious, which has a little red tail that sticks up. It's a great fly for that situation. We fish it on about a six-weight with 2X tippet.

Tom Rowland: I have a funny love affair with carp. When I was a kid my parents used to take me to a little amusement park called Lake Winnipesaukee, and there was a corner of the lake where everybody fed the carp popcorn. Those carp got as big as your leg from eating popcorn every single day, and I always wanted to catch one, even though people told me I didn't want to. I still never did, but I always thought it looked like it would be a blast. I know a lot of Rocky Mountain guides will head to the lower reaches of rivers when it gets warm and start targeting carp as a break from trout, and clients who've fished with them for twenty years suddenly wonder why they never did it before.

Guy Jeans: We've had a real cultural shift here where people are actually targeting them and we're guiding for carp now. What's neat about Lake Isabella is that it gets really low through the season, and then right about now the snowmelt starts filling it back in, creating what we call the Isabella Flats. You're fishing in knee-deep water with thousands of carp around.

Tom Rowland: On a good day out there, are you talking about catching one fish, or twenty?

Guy Jeans: Yesterday I went out for about an hour and a half and caught five or six, but it really depends on the angler and their casting.

Tom Rowland: That's the thing with fishing, you can take the best angler in the world after permit and one fish is a fantastic day, and the next person who can barely cast catches three. I always like to set the expectation going in. We had some people at our carp tournament, which we call Carp Fest, who had never caught a carp before, and they all caught a couple. Teams are two anglers, and you have to catch your five best fish, scored by length in inches.

California's Native Trout and the Heritage Challenge

Tom Rowland: I'd love to come try that. California is a state I really don't know well as far as fishing goes. It's probably one of the states I've spent the least time in, even though you've got saltwater, sturgeon, largemouth and smallmouth bass in the Delta, and all the trout fishing.

Guy Jeans: Here's an interesting thing. California has ten native trout species. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs what's called the Heritage Trout Challenge: catch six of the ten native trout and they'll give you a print by Joseph Tomelleri, a famous fish artist, with your name on it. It's popular around our area because you can knock out three of them close by, the golden trout, the Kern River rainbow, and the little Kern golden. Then you have to travel the rest of the state for the others, like the Lahontan cutthroat, the coastal rainbow, and the McCloud River rainbow.

Tom Rowland: Getting all ten, that's wild. What makes the Kern River rainbow special?

Guy Jeans: It can get pretty good size up in the upper stretches. The river starts up by Mount Whitney, flows south through Sequoia National Park, through the Golden Trout Wilderness, then into Sequoia National Forest down to Kernville. Up in the upper stretches it's managed as a wild trout fishery, catch and release, for about fifty miles. You can hike into a really pristine area and catch some beautiful trout. They actually say that rainbow trout stocked all over the world trace back to either the Kern River or the McCloud River strains.

Breaking Into Competitive Fly Fishing

Tom Rowland: That's pretty cool history. So, going back to competitive fly fishing, which we've touched on before with other guests on the show, how did you get into that world?

Guy Jeans: Back around 2005, I heard they were starting to hold competitions around the country to put together a U.S. national fly fishing team. They held a western regional on the Kings River, about three hours north of the Kern, so I signed up. Jack Dennis was coaching back then, which is how I met him and the whole Jackson Hole crew, guys like Jeff Currier and Carter Andrews.

Tom Rowland: The whole crew came out west.

Guy Jeans: They held it on the Kings, and that was my first entry into competition. I learned so much. They actually brought in a real accomplished Polish nympher, a longtime world champion, to teach some classes for the anglers. He taught the U.S. guys a lot, and eventually we all started fishing that way and doing well in competitions.

Tom Rowland: What was the first big thing that opened up a whole new universe for you? Was it euro nymphing?

Guy Jeans: It was. It was learning to look at your beat in a completely different way. You draw a certain section of river, and you might have pocket water, you might have slow frog water in between, and you have to figure out your approach. You'd rig different rods for different water, a streamer rod, a dry fly rod, a nymph rig, all set up at once. I didn't realize how physical it was going to be, running up and down the banks, staying balanced, just being able to breathe and physically pull it off.

Tom Rowland: And you're running up and down the bank because you're working a beat on the clock.

Guy Jeans: Exactly. You get three hours to fish a beat, and if you've got four fish and think you can squeeze out one more, you're running to get there. There's a real rush the moment you catch that first fish in a heat. I really enjoyed meeting guides and anglers from all over the country and learning from them. Afterward we'd compare notes, what fly, what tippet, what worked. I think the whole U.S. team got better because everybody was talking and figuring things out together.

Tom Rowland: It becomes a team, pooling knowledge together. It's interesting how that happens in saltwater too. Someone decides a technique like strike indicators shouldn't be allowed, and once you take that away from good anglers who are determined to catch fish anyway, a whole new style develops. If indicators had stayed legal, maybe European nymphing never becomes a thing. It's the same story with circle hooks, monofilament versus braid, or chumming rules in tournaments. Take away one tool and anglers invent something new around it.

Guy Jeans: The competitions also include still-water events, which is a whole different discipline to learn.

Reading Blind Water in Still-Water Competition

Tom Rowland: I read Randall Kaufmann's books when I was starting out, all about the high mountain lakes and backpacking in for golden trout. With your background around all those lakes, how did you do in the still-water side of competition?

Guy Jeans: I did well, but I was always learning. Some of the national events were on lakes completely different from what I fish at home, using different sinking lines and trying to figure out depth blind, since you can't pre-fish these lakes. They'd rig up a drogue, basically a big bag off the back of the boat to slow your drift, with one person rowing and two anglers each covering one side of the boat, trying to figure out where the fish are with no prior knowledge.

Stepping Away From Competition

Tom Rowland: So when did you decide you weren't going to keep doing the competitions?

Guy Jeans: It takes a lot of time. You're away from the family, away from the business. I was trying to run a business as well, so that's kind of where I had to draw the line. I told myself I was going to concentrate on the business and my family instead.

Tom Rowland: That's why I stopped doing redfish tournaments, almost exactly the same reason. It pulls you away, you're on the road thinking, what am I doing here, I want to be home with my family. For me, that was really the birth of doing the TV shows instead, getting away from the tournament grind. My kids are only this age once.

From Guide to Fly Shop Owner

Tom Rowland: There's another interesting jump in your career, going from guiding and sleeping in your truck to opening a fly shop. I've seen other guides make that jump in both freshwater and saltwater, and it seems really hard. I know what goes into it, watching an owner go through the books, making sure everything's priced right, dealing with inventory that isn't selling because you guessed wrong on what would move.

Guy Jeans: I still haven't fully figured that part out.

Tom Rowland: It seems like a full-time job in itself. How did you make that jump from guide to shop owner, which probably turns you into an outfitter running other guides pretty quickly too?

Guy Jeans: I guided by myself for a long time, then hired guides as the business grew. Business goes up and down. Lately what's been really great is having guides working for me who are genuinely fishy and love to guide, not just clock in and out. That's given me more freedom instead of coming back from a guide day to a stack of phone calls and orders. Now I can concentrate more on the business side, the marketing, the ordering, and put more energy into my fly fishing school, plus some travel doing saltwater and surf fishing near my hometown, and casting classes up and down the state. A lot of people think owning a fly shop is basically retirement, but it's a real retail business, managing people, and a lot of work.

Running a Fly Shop in the Internet Age

Tom Rowland: That's another thing I wanted to ask about, running a fly shop, which is such a personal, hands-on business, in the age of the internet, and you've survived from the early internet days to now, with a lot of change along the way.

Guy Jeans: The internet side of competition is huge. A lot of the bigger rod companies and clothing brands keep a pretty tight watch on what people are selling their products for. If you're on your website with a price that's lower than it should be, they'll call you up and tell you to change it back, which actually makes things fairer for shops out there. Personal service is what really matters in our business. When I first opened, I told myself I was going to welcome everybody with open arms, even total beginners who walk in intimidated and not knowing anything. That's our approach: we're friendly, we ask how their day's going, we want people to get into the sport, and we don't hold onto secrets or secret spots. We want people to go out, have a good time, and take their kids fishing. Before I opened my own shop, I actually went on a tour of other fly shops, and there's a big difference in the personalities and how some of them treat people. Friendly, sharing service has been a huge part of our success.

Welcoming Beginners and Growing the Sport

Guy Jeans: We do probably ninety percent beginner business, both in the shop and in guiding, plus big beginner fly fishing classes with two instructors. We also saw a big bump after COVID, when our whole industry jumped a ridiculous percentage as people wanted to get outside.

Tom Rowland: Did you see fishing license numbers in California go way up?

Guy Jeans: Absolutely. California is still a bit behind the times on licensing, though. Right now it's old school, buy it January first and it doesn't matter if you buy it in September, same price. They're working on making it a rolling twelve months from purchase date, and once they do that I think they'll sell even more licenses.

Tom Rowland: Where do you think the fly fishing industry is now in terms of intimidation and barriers to entry? Fly fishing has a reputation for being a little intimidating, with certain personalities you run into.

Guy Jeans: I think a lot of people in the industry have realized beginners are great customers, and it's taken that direction. There are still some folks who come in a little too decked out with an ego that can't fit through the door, and we try to deflate that pretty quickly. It's just fishing, let's have fun. But overall I think more people are getting into the sport and people are friendlier about it. We also have a woman named Celine who started a women's day on the river, and every year about sixty women come up to the Kern to learn how to fly fish. It's amazing, and I think a lot more women are getting into the sport because of things like that.

Tom Rowland: I've guided a lot of couples, and about ninety-eight percent of the time you've got the guy who's supposedly really good, and his wife is along for the ride and ends up out-fishing him five to one. I've got two boys and a girl, and it seems like women can be more naturally inclined to be good at this, but also more naturally inclined to feel intimidated getting started. I wonder if that's getting better.

Gear, Comfort, and Getting More People Hooked

Tom Rowland: You've got a lot of companies now embracing women in the sport and making gear built for them. That matters, because a properly fitted pair of waders and jacket makes for a much more enjoyable day than gear that's just hanging off you. I think back to when Gore-Tex waders were invented around the same era as certain fly fishing movies came out, and suddenly everybody was more comfortable, the rods got better, drift boats replaced johnboats almost overnight, and fishing just got more fun in a short period of time. It's the same idea with women's-specific gear, and it's the same with kids. If a kid isn't comfortable out there, you can forget them ever wanting to go again.

Guy Jeans: I think women also just tend to listen a little better when they're learning, and we already know how to do everything, so it clicks.

From the Kern to the Delta

Tom Rowland: You've got the music thing going, the fishing thing, the schools, the shop, the guiding, everything but tournaments. You just need to get back into competition to round out your life.

Guy Jeans: Actually, I'm doing a tournament up on the Delta soon. I got invited to fish the Costa Bass 'N Fly, a bass-on-fly event with something like sixty boats. I got permission to go, so I'm going to do it.

Tom Rowland: That'll be fun. I've heard the Delta is the kind of place you could fish for a lifetime and keep finding new water, kind of like the Louisiana delta at one point, nooks and crannies that have never seen a lure.

Music Career: The Stoneflies and Ska Roots

Guy Jeans: Speaking of things that keep going, to pop back to music for a second, my songwriting partner and I live three hours apart, so we write songs back and forth over the internet and then go into the studio to record. I enjoy that part, and I also really enjoy making music videos, not just performing.

Tom Rowland: Tell me about starting out in your first ska band, for anyone listening who isn't familiar with the genre.

Guy Jeans: Ska is kind of like an upbeat reggae. Modern bands influenced by ska that people would recognize are groups like Sublime, No Doubt, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, all around my age. We actually opened up for some of those bands, and later on in life I got to play alongside them too. My friends and I loved reggae, ska, and eighties punk, and when we first started playing together it was in garages at parties, not knowing how to play all that well, just having fun. We weren't even twenty-one yet when we got invited to play a small club in Ventura. We weren't very good, but we packed the place and the owners sold a lot of drinks, so we started playing every Friday and got better fast, really growing up as a band in that club around age twenty or twenty-one. Later a horn section joined us, guys who were much better musicians than we were, studio players in good bands, and we learned a lot from them about arranging songs. We started touring up and down the coast, playing bigger shows and cutting albums. Through a few earlier lineups, bands called Lion Eyes and Popinata, we eventually became the Stoneflies, which has been our main project for about ten years now, mostly fairs and beer fests these days since we're a little too old to stay out until three in the morning. We like getting done around nine. It's always been about writing our own music and enjoying watching people react to it. Recently a couple came up to me and said they met at one of our shows years ago, still listen to our music, and now their kids love it too. It's pretty cool seeing that.

Tom Rowland: So when you were having that success at twenty-one and things were building momentum, did you think you'd be a career musician?

Guy Jeans: For sure. It was a whirlwind. We got record deals, we got bad record deals, we even got sued for a hundred thousand dollars by a producer at one point.

Tom Rowland: And at some point you decided you had to do something else.

Getting Back on Stage After Loss

Guy Jeans: I took a break for about ten years and barely played. Then one day my bass player's wife called and said she wanted to see if she could get the band back together. She told me she'd just been diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, and asked if I was in. I said absolutely. She's the one who actually got our band back together, and we played the biggest theater in Ventura and sold it out, a huge reunion after ten years apart. About a year later she passed away. It was because of her that we all got back together, which is kind of amazing when you think about it.

Tom Rowland: When you got back out there, what did that feel like, was it like a missing piece you didn't realize was gone?

Guy Jeans: Performing in front of people again felt, for me, kind of like catching your first permit. It's just exhilarating. Seeing people laughing and having a good time is probably the best feeling there is, hearing everybody singing along.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. So I'm guessing that ten-year gap from playing music is when you really got into fishing hard.

Guy Jeans: Exactly. I had total tunnel vision, I was on a mission. When somebody tells you that you can't do something, that always motivates you to do more. A lot of people told me I wasn't going to succeed at fly fishing or opening a shop, and I had to prove them wrong. I love that. When somebody tells me something like that, I think, we'll see about that. I like to create things and make them succeed, in anything really.

Talking Music, MTV, and Live Shows

Tom Rowland: Now you've got both, the music and the fishing, the schools and the shop and the guiding, everything.

Guy Jeans: Growing up in Ventura, what did you get into as far as the ska stuff back in the day?

Tom Rowland: I liked the Specials a lot. My sisters are about eight and ten years older than me, so the music my friends were exposed to through their older siblings was different from what was on the radio, and the Specials and reggae were part of that for me. Then I got into punk. I actually wonder today why there isn't more anger or intensity in music from young people the way there used to be. Everything feels super happy now, which I don't mind, I'm a positive guy, but there was a real intensity in that older music that seems missing today. I like almost all kinds of music, there are only a few types that just don't do anything for me. I probably shouldn't say it, but a lot of modern mainstream country feels canned and interchangeable to me, whereas guys like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Sturgill Simpson, I love that stuff.

Guy Jeans: We actually play a big concert in the park here every July, the whole town turns out, and afterward some local musicians asked what kind of music we even played, and it went over great. What's interesting about this area is Bakersfield, which people call the West Coast Nashville, home to Buck Owens and the Crystal Palace, and Merle Haggard grew up around there too. There's a whole country culture in Bakersfield that got me checking out old-school country.

Tom Rowland: I saw Dwight Yoakam in concert in a small theater a few years back and he absolutely rocked it, one of those true professional entertainers where you realize you know every word even if you didn't think you did. Another one that stuck with me was John Cougar Mellencamp, back during his Farm Aid era. I wasn't even that big a fan of his music, but I got up-close tickets and came away thinking, I still might not love the music that much, but that guy is a phenomenal entertainer. There are performers like that everywhere, if you give them a chance they'll win you over.

Guy Jeans: I had a similar experience with U2. I wasn't a big fan, but somebody got tickets and we went to the LA Coliseum to see them, and I was blown away by how Bono controlled the crowd. That's when I became a fan, just from the showmanship.

Tom Rowland: There's more to a lot of these bands live than what you hear on the radio. I think about the shows I wish I'd seen, like Led Zeppelin or The Who, back when general admission floors meant people would actually storm the stage, which is part of why concerts eventually moved to assigned seating after people got hurt.

Guy Jeans: It's funny watching my kids discover our old music now. Recently we were cruising in the truck and I put on Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, and they thought it was really cool, though they also asked how much longer the song was going to go on.

Where to Find Guy Jeans and Kern River Fly Shop

Tom Rowland: We'll bring this one to a close here. Guy, how can people find your stuff, your schools, your fly shop, and fish the Kern with you?

Guy Jeans: The best way is our website, kernriverflyshop.com. You can also find us on YouTube under my name, Guy Jeans, or on Instagram at Kern River Fly Shop. But the website is the best way for sure.

Tom Rowland: Awesome, man. It's great to catch up with you, and we're going to do another podcast soon where you interview me on your show. Definitely check out Guy and what he's got going on with the Kern River Fly Shop, and if you're in California, go check out his school, whether you're after carp or trout.

Guy Jeans: Cool, awesome, alright, thanks bud.

Tom Rowland: That's it. We'll see you.