ABOUT
I'm the guy who was trying to book the trip.
James Reed. Twenty-five years a Honda master technician, shop foreman where I work, and an adult-onset hunter. I have never guided a day in my life. I built Timber & Tackle from the other side of the transaction.
Written by James Reed, who builds it
The booking that started it
A friend from work sent me a FareHarbor link to book a guided trip. There wasn't a whole lot of information on it. It was basically a calendar where you select your day. That's not pictures. That's not hyping me in any way. I don't feel personally invested in doing this, and it's a lot of money to go and then just to have — yes, check this on the calendar. Man, that just didn't sit right with me.
He went. He said it was awesome. I want to be clear about that, because this is an easy story to tell as a complaint about a guide and it is not one — the guide was good and the trip was worth the money. The problem was that I couldn't tell any of that from the page standing in front of it.
And I should be fair about whose page that was. Any booking tool shows what the operator puts into it, so I was looking at one guide's page, not at everything that software can do. But a man who is on the water all week has no evenings left for uploading photos and writing up what a day with him is actually like, and telling him to go and do that has never worked. That is the part I kept coming back to. If a page is the only thing standing between a guide and a booking, the page has to do more than a calendar does — and somebody other than the guide has to do most of the work of building it.
So Timber & Tackle builds the whole site first and puts the booking calendar inside it. Send us your photos, your trips and your old site if you have one; we build the thing and send you the link before you pay a dollar. Taking the booking is one of the jobs that site does. It is not what the site is.
What I actually hunt and fish
I started during COVID. Adult-onset hunter, which is the phrase I use because it is accurate: I came to this late, from nothing, and I had to go learn it.
Turkey, deer, duck, rabbit. I fish the Feather River for salmon with my son, who is the bigger fisherman of the two of us and a big duck hunter besides. I bought a points tag in Colorado for mule deer, California deer tag odds being what they are.
None of which makes me an expert in your water or your unit. It does mean I know what it is to be standing in the half dark at first light genuinely unsure whether I am in the right spot, which is the other half of why this exists.
Why I would hire a guide
I would love to go out with guides that know what they're doing, because I'm not sure if I'm in the right spot or how I'm doing it.
That is a customer talking, and it is the reason there is a second library on this site written for people booking trips rather than people running them — how to pick a guide, what a first guided day is really like, what the money covers, what to bring. The questions it answers are the ones I had.
Read the ones for people booking a trip →Why it costs what it costs
Here is the assumption sitting underneath the price. I don't think most guides are running a company. It's fishing season, you go out and you fish every weekend, you make some money to help keep food on the table, and the rest of the year you probably are some sort of roofer, or you do taxes, and you are a fishing guide on the side.
I know that life from the other end of it. Sixty hours a week, about an hour's drive each way, twelve hour days. I eat at my toolbox. The money I make on a weekend is Christmas and the power bill, and per hour it beats the day job badly enough that it is worth losing the Saturday for. That is the whole reason anybody does side work, and it is the reason the software for it has to be cheap.
So it is $19/mo, or $190/yr, and you're free until you accept your first booking. Not as a discount. Because the person paying it is doing this after a full week, and the last thing he needs is one more bill big enough to have to think about.
And we will never take a cut of a client you brought us. Not the repeat, not the referral, not the one who found you at the boat show. That one is not a pricing decision, it's the point.
What I am not
I am not a guide. I have never run a charter, never packed anyone into an elk camp, and I don't know your season, your ramp or what your clients ask you for at seven in the morning. Everything in here about running a guide business came from reading, from asking, and from guides telling me I had it wrong. I would much rather be corrected than worked around: hello@timberandtackle.guide.
I also build software for people doing trade work on the side, and that is the same person, the same week and the same reason. This is the one where I was the customer first.
There are no reviews on this site, no testimonials and no count of how many guides use it. There is nothing to count yet. When there is, it will be real names of real people who said yes to being named.
How the writing here works
Some of the articles in the two libraries were drafted with AI help and edited afterwards. Nothing publishes itself the day it is written: a draft sits for two days first, so there is time to read it and pull it. I would rather tell you that than have you work it out.
Every number on this site about another company — a fee, a commission, a plan price — is written down in a file I keep, with the link it came from, the exact sentence it came from and the date I checked it. Where a company doesn't publish a rate, the page says they don't publish it instead of estimating one for them.
And nothing here will ever promise you a ranking on Google. We can build you a site you own and hand you the keys to it. Google decides the rest, and anybody telling you different is guessing at your expense.
Two doors from here
If you are booking a trip, start with the questions I had. If you run the trips, we will build your whole site and send you the link before you pay anything.
Free until you accept your first booking. Then $19/mo, or $190/yr. From February 1, 2027 the price is $29/mo for new guides; anyone already on the $19 founding rate keeps it for as long as they stay subscribed.