I guess it is pretty obvious, to a lot of BB members anyway, and particularly those who read the Fishing Reports Forum regularly, where I stand on this one.

Reports to me are the when, where, how and what happened on an outing on a given piece of water.

Most of the places I fish and report on were "disclosed" to me by someone over the past six years, some are places that I found just out exploring on my own. Seems it would be kind of selfish of me to hold all that good stuff close to the vest for whatever reason, when others were willing to share it with me.

The when may be a key to the results reported. Morning, afternoon, evening ?? It might make a difference to someone who is thinking about going there.

The where in my reports is usually pretty general - and you'd have to be pretty good at using photos to locate specific stretches of water.

The how goes to the flies that worked, and those that didn't. If someone wants to fish that stream or river that I'm willing to share with them, why wouldn't I also give them a leg up on hooking up with some fishies ?? They might choose to use something else, and may do a lot better with their selection of flies. More power to them, and if they report on how they did, I'll learn something, too.

I try to describe what happened as objectively as possible, in terms of species caught, numbers, sizes, etc. Because words like good or poor and big or small are very subjective, and what would be a good day for me might be a poor day for someone else, or vice versa. Size matters to a lot of folks - they might not want to go to a place where someone else had a "great" time fishing for trout mostly under 10".

A fishing report, from my point of view, is something that will help someone else decide if they want to invest the time, energy, and money to go fish a specific stream, river, or lake. It may be the kind, size, number of fish they will have an opportunity to fish to, or it may be the scenery or the wildlife that fill out the experience, or the fact they can expect to have it pretty much to themselves or find themselves in a crowd.

After 150 plus fishing reports posted on the Fishing Reports Forum over the past fourteen months, I have only run into a few more people on the waters I fish, and have not noticed any deterioration in the fishing experience. I've run into a few people on those streams who were there because of my reports. They were good people having a good time. They are certainly welcome to that.

John