Written and maintained by Pablo Ruiz Quintero. Last reviewed . Every claim below is meant to be checkable against the site itself; where one stops being true it is removed from here first.
This page exists so that the claims elsewhere on the site can be checked against something. It is short on purpose: every line below is either true today or should be deleted.
Who writes this
One person: Pablo Ruiz Quintero, who builds the data pipeline, writes the editorial content and keeps the verification log. There is no anonymous content team and no outsourced articles. Every page on this site carries that authorship in its structured data, pointing at a single identity with a public ORCID record.
He is not a fisheries biologist, and the site does not claim otherwise. The expertise being offered here is in reading public instrument data correctly and refusing to publish what cannot be verified. Biological information comes from state fisheries agencies and published literature, and where it has been wrong on this site, the log says so.
Where the numbers come from
Conditions come from four instruments, each named with the endpoint queried on the methodology page: USGS Water Services for flow and stage, NOAA CO-OPS for tides, Open-Meteo for weather and pressure, and an astronomical calculation for solunar windows. Licence fees come from the agency that sells the licence, with the date of reading recorded on each state page. Where a source is a publisher acting for the agency rather than the agency itself, the page says which.
We do not use compiled fee tables or search-result summaries as a source. Three states are listed wrongly in those, which is recorded in the log.
Where software writes and where a person decides
Being straight about this matters more than it is comfortable. The daily report on each water page is generated by software from that morning’s readings: the activity score, the verdict line and the timing windows are computed, not typed. That is the point of them, and it is why they can be regenerated every day for 996 waters without anyone inventing a fishing report.
The editorial content — what each water is like, how a species behaves, what a licence covers — is written and reviewed by a person, with AI used as a drafting and research tool in the same way a word processor or a search engine is a tool. Every figure in it is checked against a source by hand before it ships. The assistant on the site answers from the site’s own pages and is constrained to link only to pages that exist, after it was caught inventing a URL.
What we do not do is generate editorial text at scale and publish it unread. Each of the 996 water pages has its own written entry, held to a minimum length and audited before release, and four of them have been rewritten because they described the wrong place.
How this site pays for itself
There is no paywall, no subscription and nothing on the site is placed because someone paid for it. There are no affiliate links on licence pages: the buy link always goes to the state agency, never to a reseller, and if a site charges a processing fee on top of the state fee we say so. Should that change, this section changes first and the change is dated in the log.
What we will not publish
- No invented reports. Every daily report is generated from live readings taken that morning. There is no stock text waiting for a day when the API fails: if the data does not arrive, the page says so and refreshes.
- No fake reviews or catches. Angler reports on this site come from anglers. We do not seed them, write them or pay for them, and there are no invented star ratings anywhere on the site.
- A gauge is never assumed. A water only gets a live gauge or tide station after the API has been queried and the name it returns has been read. Six candidate gauges have been rejected for returning a different river.
- A figure with no source is not published. Fishing licence fees are read off the agency that sells the licence, with the date recorded. Three states are missing from the site entirely because their fee schedule could not be read.
- Mistakes are logged, not quietly fixed. The verification log records what was wrong, how wrong it was, and when it was corrected, including the errors that were ours rather than the source’s.
- No fishing or safety advice beyond the data. These are conditions reports and planning tools. Ice thickness, water safety and what is legal to keep are decisions that belong with you and the agency that regulates the water.
Corrections
Corrections are logged, not quietly applied. When a figure changes because it was wrong, an entry goes in the verification log with the date, what was wrong, what it would have cost the reader, and what was done. The log currently holds 20 entries, 10 of them our own errors.
To report something: hola@prqdigital.com. Include the page and what you believe is wrong. If you are an agency and we have misread your publication, that is the fastest way to have it fixed.