The first question I usually get when someone calls about a trip is some version of "where do you fish?" I get why people ask it. They're trying to picture what they're signing up for. But I never have a great answer ahead of time, because I don't pick the spot until the morning of the trip, and sometimes not even then.
That's not me being cagey. It's the actual job. The spot isn't a fixed thing on Whitney. The lake is 23,000 acres of water that changes week to week, day to day, sometimes hour to hour. The fish move. The bait moves. The wind moves. A spot that loaded in October might be dead in November. A point that produced this morning at 6:30 won't necessarily produce tomorrow morning at 6:30. If I picked the spot a week in advance and stuck to it, I'd be a bad guide.
Here's how I actually figure it out.
The Night Before
The work starts the evening before the trip. I'm not on the water, but I'm getting ready.
I check water temp. Surface temp mostly, but the trend matters more than the number. A lake that dropped four degrees over a cold front behaves different than a lake that's been steady for a week. Cold front yesterday, warm-up today, that's a fish-feeding setup if I read it right. Flat conditions for ten days running, that's a different problem.
I check the wind forecast. Direction matters as much as speed. North wind in winter pushes baitfish into specific corners of the lake. South wind in summer stacks shad against the dam. 25-mph gusts mean I'm not running open water at sunrise, I'm starting in protected pockets. The wind tells me half of where I'll begin.
I check what I've seen the last week. Not other guides' reports, because none of them publish anything. I mean my own trips. What was working. What wasn't. Where the bait showed up. Where I marked fish and didn't fish them. Whether the surface activity has started. I keep mental notes from every trip, and the night before is when I pull them up.
I check the moon. People will roll their eyes at this. I don't care. Moon phase matters for catfish, and it matters for stripers feeding at night. Full moon week, the dawn bite can be weaker because everything fed under the moon and they're full at first light. New moon, they're hungry in the morning. It's not a guarantee. But it's a factor and I'd rather have the factor than ignore it.
At the Truck Before Sunrise
I'm at the ramp before the sun is up. That part isn't strategy, it's just how the job works. But the first ten minutes off the trailer matter.
I look at the water. Calm or chopped. Clear or stained. Any surface activity. If I see shad flicking a hundred yards from the ramp, I'm already adjusting. If it's flat with no birds working, I'm going to my best guess and trusting the screen.
I look at the sky. Cloud cover changes how fish position themselves. Overcast pushes them shallower and makes them more willing to chase. Bluebird sky after a front and the bite tightens up and drops deeper. By the time we're idling out of the no-wake zone, I've usually committed to a direction.
I don't tell the client all of this. They're getting coffee, getting their bearings, taking the boat in for the first time. But by the time we leave the ramp, I've already run through six different versions of the day in my head and picked one.
The First Thirty Minutes on the Water
This is when the plan either holds or breaks.
I run to the first spot, but I'm not committed to it yet. I'm watching the screen the whole way there. A fish finder shows you more than the spot you're sitting on. It shows you what's underneath you between spots. If I run past a stretch of channel and see bait stacked from 20 to 35 feet with arches underneath, that wasn't the plan, but now it might be. I'll mark the GPS and circle back.
When I get to where I was going, I idle around it for a minute before I tell anybody to drop a line. I'm reading bottom contour, looking for bait, marking fish if they're there. If the spot looks the way it should look, we fish it. If it doesn't, we move. That decision happens fast. I'm not going to sit on dead water for an hour to prove a hypothesis. If the conditions don't match the read, the read was wrong, and I'd rather find that out at 6:45 than at 9:00.
Calling the Audible
Most trips don't go exactly the way I planned them the night before. Most of them require me to adjust at least once. That's normal. That's the job.
The audible usually comes when I've been on a spot for 20 to 30 minutes and haven't seen what I expected to see. Not a fish in the boat yet, fine, that happens. But if I haven't even marked fish on the screen, or the bait isn't where I thought it would be, or the wind shifted and now my drift is wrong, I'm pulling the trolling motor and moving.
I try to explain the move while it's happening, not after. "I'm not seeing what I want here, we're going to slide over to that point." Most clients appreciate that. It tells them the day is being driven by what's actually showing up, not by stubbornness. And it sets the expectation that we might move again if the next read is wrong too.
Some days I move three or four times before something locks in. Some days the first spot is the spot and we don't leave it. I don't know which kind of day it's going to be when we leave the ramp. I find out as we go.
What I Won't Do
I won't run to the same place every trip just because it worked last time. That's the fastest way to get worse at this job. The lake punishes that kind of laziness.
I won't drop you on a spot that doesn't look right just because I told you on the phone we'd start there. The plan changes. The plan should change. The whole point of having a guide is having somebody who's actually paying attention to conditions, not somebody running a tour.
And I won't pretend to know more than I do. Some days I read the lake well and we put fish in the boat. Some days I read it wrong and the bite is slower than I expected. I'll tell you which kind of day it's shaping up to be by mid-morning. I've been doing this long enough to call it honestly.
What This Means on a Guided Trip
You don't need to know any of this to enjoy the trip. That's the point of hiring a guide. The decision-making is my job. Yours is to hold the rod, watch the line, and listen when I say set the hook.
But if you've ever wondered why a guide can fish the same lake somebody else fishes and consistently put more fish in the boat, this is most of the answer. It's not the spot. It's the decision tree that runs in the background, every trip, all day. Conditions in. Adjustments out. Repeat until somebody's holding a striper.
I started this on Ray Roberts, where I was ranked number one before I moved south. The lake's different. The process is the same. Read the water. Test the read. Adjust. Don't fall in love with a spot.
Book a trip. I'll show you what the morning looks like.
