Kindergarten teacher, fishing guide all in a day's work for Jason Durham
Jun. 2—HUBBARD COUNTY, Minn. — It took a few years, Jason Durham says, to figure out what he wanted to do in life, but he eventually landed on the perfect career combination.
Kindergarten teacher — and fishing guide.
There definitely are parallels between the two pursuits, said Durham, who graduated from UND in 2000 with a bachelor's degree in elementary education and got his master's in educational leadership in 2003 from Southwest State University — now Southwest Minnesota State University — in Marshall, Minnesota.
"A ton," Durham said of the parallels. "Patience is No. 1. I'm so blessed that my parents were both incredibly patient people."
It definitely runs in the family.
Durham, 46, of Park Rapids, Minnesota, just wrapped up his 22nd year as a kindergarten teacher in his hometown of Nevis, Minnesota. This is his 32nd year of guiding, says Durham, owner of Go Fish! Guide Service.
He started guiding as a 15-year-old, working out of an uncle's bait shop in Nevis and hitting the water in a 14-foot Lund with a 35-horse Johnson SeaHorse outboard. His dad would have to drop him off at the lake that first season, since he wasn't old enough to drive.
Eventually, Durham worked his way up to a 17-foot Ranger with a 50-horse outboard; then a bigger Ranger with a 150-horse outboard. He's been on the pro staff for Crestliner boats for 20 years and this year is running a Crestliner 2250 "Authority," a veritable fishing machine powered by a 400-horse Mercury outboard.
Running mostly 4-hour trips — he does as many as three trips some days — Durham last year did 211 guide trips. His guiding schedule doesn't end when the school year begins.
"I pull the boat to school almost every day in the fall," he said. "Weekends, of course, too, but once November hits, then it's pretty much done. For some reason, people don't love to fish when you have to chisel ice out from the access."
There'd be no ice to chisel on this balmy Memorial Day morning as Durham launched the big Crestliner in a small Hubbard County lake. After several days of heat, sun and wind, the sporadic cloud cover with a chance of afternoon rain would be a blessing.
His clientele for the day included a 13-year-old who had never caught a largemouth bass, the target species for the day.
"Two things I strive for — firsts and personal bests," Durham said.
The technique would be relatively simple, he explained: Pitching jigs and plastic worms, or "wacky rigs" — a 2/0 wide-gap hook threaded through the middle of a plastic worm — into shallow water and waiting for a bass to strike.
Both presentations are finesse techniques requiring patience, Durham said, and he quickly went into teaching mode.
Pointing toward a submerged log, he explained why that would be a good place to cast.
"Fish like to be around things, so any type of structure like that is appealing," he said. "You have to think a little bit about, 'Where is my retrieve going to come in if I hook a fish?' So in that situation, I wouldn't cast over the log — I would try to get right to the edge.
"What you're going to do is just lob it out there."
Keep a bend in the line when the bait hits the bottom, he advised, wait several seconds and watch the line to see if it moves; then, slowly work it back to the boat.
"If you see your line tick or pop at all, you're using that as the strike indicator, and you're going to set the hook," he said. "If it's totally stuck, I'll just set the hook, because if it's a fish, you get it. If it's a weed, the (plastic worm) will pop off and that creates a reaction strike."
Patience.
"The biggest thing I see with people who use this (technique) is they go too fast," Durham said. "They're not patient enough. The fish want to hit it when it's not moving so that's the key, so just let it sit there for a while, and they'll eat it right off the bottom."
With dozens upon dozens of lakes to ply his trade as a fishing guide, Nevis is the perfect place to be a kindergarten teacher, Durham says. His classroom is only two blocks from his childhood home.
"Within a 10-mile radius, we've got 100 lakes," he said. "Within a 25-mile radius, we've got 400."
The abundance of lakes offers a variety of fishing opportunities, from largemouth and smallmouth bass to panfish, stocked trout, pike, muskies and walleyes.
"You just pick a lake for the day," Durham said. "It's like, 'Oh, we have high sun and no clouds — let's go to this lake that's not as clear.' But what's surprising is how many lakes that are ultra clear, you can catch walleyes out of, in the middle of the day when it's bright and sunny."
Walleye fishing, he says, isn't necessarily a numbers game like it can be on big waters such as Lake of the Woods, Upper Red or Devils Lake.
"It can still be good all summer long, and that period the second or third week of June is just about 'can't-miss,'" Durham said. "But we also don't usually talk about limits. I always tell people, if you get a handful of walleyes, you've had a pretty good day.
"But you also have the chance of catching the biggest walleye of your life on many of these lakes."
Durham is part of a close-knit network of "seven, maybe eight" guides in the Park Rapids area who work together and help each other out.
"We're all so close," he said. "We're on the phone with each other every day, we've got running text message strings. There is no competition. We do not compete with each other, we share trips with each other, and we don't charge kickbacks or anything like that.
"We share all of our information, and that's pretty unique."
Durham's experience as an educator and a fishing guide also has helped open doors in the fishing industry. Besides Crestliner, his list of sponsors includes such industry mainstays as Mercury, ShoreLand'r trailers, Vexilar and Clam Outdoors. He also has written two books, "Pro Tactics: Panfish" and "Pro Tactics: Ice Fishing," does numerous fishing seminars on the sports show circuit, and in 2013 hosted then-Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton during that year's Governor's Fishing Opener in Park Rapids.
Dayton, who wasn't known for his fishing prowess, landed a walleye just minutes after the midnight fishing opener. The walleye, Durham says, was bigger than the other two fish combined that Dayton had caught during previous openers.
"Jason is my new hero," Dayton proclaimed at the time. "He can walk on water."
Fishing clientele varies, Durham says, from people who've lived on a lake for 25 years and are convinced it's the dead sea, to experienced anglers.
He's "never had a jerk in the boat," Durham says, and repeat business is "definitely high."
"You see people get into the boat and the moment they sit down, you can visibly see all the stress leave their body, and the catching fish part, that's bonus stuff," Durham said. "They're just glad they're not in a cubicle, in traffic or sitting at their kid's soccer practice, that they have no obligations at that time."
As good times on the water always do, the hours flew by on this Memorial Day bass fishing excursion. Despite the holiday weekend, Durham and the anglers fishing with him had the lake pretty much to themselves.
The finesse fishing presentation — definitely a "do-nothing" technique — proved too much for the largemouth bass to resist, and the wait between strikes wasn't very long. By day's end, perhaps 50 largemouth bass had been caught and released — a conservative estimate — along with several small pike and a couple of heftier specimens that flirted with 30 inches.
It had been a fine day in Durham's classroom — the classroom of the great outdoors.
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