I would recommend you hire one at least 4 times a year to learn the basic patterns of what the fish do during each season.

I will guarantee this. If you hire the right one you will learn more in one day than you will in a year by yourself.

I hired one last year at Rayburn. I am kind of tight with my money and always hesitated to do so, but I went ahead and pulled the trigger last year. The guide came highly recommended from this site. Well, just a couple of days before the trip, he send me an email asking me if it would be OK if he put me on a boat with a different guide. He gave this guy the highest accolades and kudos he could a person. So with some hesitation, I accepted. Well, we get there and this guy had ALL ancient equipment, and when I mean ancient, I mean, even the hooks on his crank baits were rusted out. His baot was an '80s model Skeeter, and all his electronics were way outdated also. Then he acted like everything he had was one of a kind and irreplaceable. Which it was not, by any stretch of the imagination. So all I learned that day for $350 was that the guide was a cheap [censored] and all the areas I should not fish. Needles to say, I did not tip the guy. It will be a long long time before I waste my money on another guide, and when I do, it will probably be for a different species other than bass, as I am already pretty good at that myself.

How many people have hired guides to become a better bass fisherman? I was thinking about hiring one to learn how to find and caught bass in deep water.