I build tools that answer questions people cannot easily answer for themselves. Fishing Report Hub exists because the fishing reports already out there share a habit: they tell you the fishing is good without telling you what they read to decide that, and a surprising number of them are not reading anything at all.
Let me be exact about what I am and am not. I am not a fisheries biologist and this site does not pretend otherwise. What I do is build and verify the data pipeline: find the right gauge for the right river, confirm it is the right river, read the agency that sets the rules rather than a table that copied it, and keep a public record of everything that turned out to be wrong. The biology in the species pages comes from the published literature and from state fisheries agencies; the judgement calls about which fish live in which water are checked against those agencies, and when they have been wrong here, the log says so.
My background is SEO and content, and the software side of it: the part that is about making an opaque system legible. I run Estimate Tax on the same principle, where the equivalent problem is calculators that give you a number without telling you which IRS document it came from.
The work, in numbers
Each with its own editorial page, not a template with the name swapped.
Every one matched by reading the site name the API returns, never by assuming the number.
Station identity confirmed against the CO-OPS metadata API before it is attached.
632 individual fees and stamps, each read off the agency that sells it.
Their agencies do not publish a fee schedule we could read, so they have no page.
26 species, assigned so that no water lists a fish that does not live there.
What “checked” means here
Plenty of sites put a fact-checked badge on a page and leave it there. This site does something narrower and more useful: for each instrument it names the endpoint that was queried, and for each figure it names the document that was read and the date it was read. Where that could not be done, the page is not published.
For a gauge that means querying the USGS API and reading the site name it returns before attaching it to a water. Six candidate gauges have been rejected for coming back as a different river, including one labelled for the Williams that was actually reporting the Cranberry, and one for Chesuncook Lake that was the Piscataquis. For a tide station it means confirming the station against the NOAA metadata API: that is how a station on Maui was caught attached to a harbour on Molokai. For a licence fee it means opening the agency’s own fee schedule, which is how three states ended up with no page at all.
What has been wrong
A log that only contains successes is not a log. The verification log records the errors in full, and a fair share of them were mine rather than the source’s: four waters written up about the wrong place entirely, a duplicate that two separate duplicate guards both missed, and a licence calculator that showed everybody the over-70 rate. It also records the errors that were upstream: three states whose fee is listed wrongly in the compiled sources most sites copy, and a set of Alaska rivers that were showing brown trout and rockfish, neither of which lives there.
What this site will not do
- It does not invent reports. Every daily report comes from readings taken that morning. If the data does not arrive, the page says so and refreshes rather than printing something plausible.
- It does not fake angler reports or reviews. There are no seeded catches and no invented ratings anywhere on the site.
- It does not guess a gauge. A water with no verifiable gauge is shown without one.
- It does not give safety or legal advice. Ice thickness, water safety and what you may keep are decisions for you and the agency that regulates that water.
Something wrong on a page? Write to hola@prqdigital.com. Corrections go in the log with the date, not quietly into the page.