Started in 2013, to help people get on the water.

I grew up fishing the way most people in the upper Midwest do: a bobber, a hook, a boat that belonged to somebody’s dad. Years later a friend in Seattle taught me to fly fish, and that changed how I saw the sport and the fish. I wanted to know where the water was, who worked it, and where the nearest fly shop was, and there was no good place to find out.

So in 2013 I registered scoutandcast.com and started one. It has been the project I come back to ever since: where to get on the water, which guides fish it, which shops are nearby. This is the version of it I always meant to build.

The best day I can describe was a steelhead trip with a guide who kept an unfancy, lived-in boat and good gear. He taught three of us the fish’s life cycle and a patient spey cast at once. He picked up trash along the river as we went, and he had given up a day with his family to be there.

The day was memorable because of who he was, not because of where the fish were. No app replaces that. The most an app can do is take the texts, the deposits and the spreadsheet off his evenings, so there are more days like it.

[NEEDS PERMISSION: the guide’s name and service, and a photograph of him working if he’ll give one. The paragraph above is written to stand without them.]

In a world where technology is accelerating past all of us, time on the water with someone who knows it deeply has never mattered more. That is the whole belief. Scout & Cast is not against technology. It is meant to be the kind that gets out of the way.

Early. Booking, trip prep, payments logged by hand and the recap work today, and a guide can set up a service in about five minutes. I am talking with guides about how they run their season before I build much more, and some of what is on the roadmap waits on those conversations. If you guide and you’d rather talk than sign up, I’d like to hear from you.