Since we’ve started our fishing travel consultancy, we’ve focused on maintaining a list of goals, a sort of moral code of what we want our purpose to be. For example we’ve vowed to do the following:

There’s a flip side to all of those rules, though. We have to ensure that we maintain certain ethical standards and rules. Too many people in the fishing business are unscrupulous or simply don’t care once they have your money. We’ve been scammed by such operators on a small level, and we know many more anglers who’ve gotten a bad taste of fishing travel in other ways as the result of poor business practices.

We can’t control whether the fish bite or how big they are, but we can ensure that you have the best possible chance of having a great trip. Here are six things we WON’T DO under any circumstances — our ultimate goal is to make sure that the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is everything you’d hoped, or to make sure that trip number 200 is the best one ever:

We Won’t Let You Spend Too Much – We know that both your time and money are precious resources. We value both in our own lives, and we work to preserve as much as we can while still getting the most out of our fishing and travel experiences. If you need to upgrade some portion of your package or your gear, we’ll tell you so, and we’ll explain why, but ultimately the choice is yours. We will treat your money as carefully as we’d treat our own – helping you find the best possible deals, best flights, and all sorts of other hacks to ensure that you have money left over for the next trip.

We Won’t Let You Go Unprepared – We perform tireless (bordering on obsessive) research and you’re the beneficiary of those efforts. Usually that means we’ve been to a place multiple times, but when we haven’t we’ll go the extra mile – checking trip reports, calling experts, dialing in the tackle, clothing and transportation choices so that little is left to chance. We don’t want you to get there and suffer because you didn’t know it was going to rain or because the only lizard color they’ll eat is watermelon or because local merchants don’t take American Express, or aren’t open on Sundays. We’ll send you a dossier ahead of time, and if any questions are still unanswered we’re on call 24/7 and will track down accurate information.

We Won’t Let You Go on the Wrong Trip — Part of the information-gathering process comes down to understanding the physical demands and accommodation requirements of each individual angler. If you can’t stand on a rocking boat, we won’t send you tuna popping. If you can’t hike into a remote stream, we might still send you to Alaska, but tell you to forego the difficult fly-in options. If you don’t like heat, we won’t recommend that you visit the Amazon for peacock bass. We want to get you fishing, but it’s our obligation to tell you if we think that something is not going to be to your liking. Ultimately, you can override that advice, but we won’t hold our tongues.

We Won’t Let You Go Places that Disrespect Staff or the Environment – We’re often heading to places that are distant from us geographically and culturally. We are guests on their soil and on their waters. It’s important to us to respect their hospitality and to make sure that it’s there for generations to come. We won’t book with outfitters or lodges who don’t have that same attitude. We want the guides and other staff to reflect our values and we need to show them equal courtesy.

We Won’t Lie to You – Some outfitters and booking agents will tell you exaggerated stories of fish counts and once-in-a-lifetime trophies as if they’re virtually guaranteed. They take the best day a given fishery has ever had and build it up by 20% or more. They’ll tell you that the average size of the fish is equal to what most people would consider a giant. Our goal is to be as straightforward as possible about ranges of numbers and ranges of sizes based on our firsthand experiences whenever possible – and on reliable sources when not possible. If anything, we aim to under promise and overdeliver.

We Won’t Let You Further the Lies – If we’re not there with you, we want to hear all of your great fish stories from the trips we set up (and even some we don’t) in all of their excruciating detail. This is what we live for: not just our own on-the-water success, but also that of people we know and like. But what we need from you in return is a pledge to do the same. We need to pass along your information to our next group of travelers, who will rely upon it in preparing the same way you relied on information from your predecessors. It’s part of the circle of success.