A Fishing Milestone?

With a cold front coming through I spent most of the day telling and listening to war stories about fishing trips down here in the Keys. You know stuff like nasty weather we got caught in and pretending that everything is just fine for the customer's while you are hoping like hell that you can keep the shiny side up on the boat or avoid getting nailed by lightning.

Since this season is starting a little slow I started thinking about how many trips I am running versus how many I have run in the past. I have run a lot of trips. For a couple years I ran mainly two half days a day for nearly three hundred days a year. That is a lot of trips so I started estimating how many trips I have run in the past ten years. My best guess is three thousand trips. That is a good number of trips for ten years.

Then I started thinking about how many of those trips sucked. The best I can figure is that about ninety sucked. That is three percent. That is not a bad percentage. Every trip that sucked is burned into my mind because I hate disappointing people. When I starting thinking about trips that were great it got difficult. I have had a lot of trips I felt were great, but there are a lot more that the customers felt were great that I thought were so so. Splitting the difference I estimate 700 trips could be considered great. That's about 25% of my trips. That sounds good to me.

Then I had to think about the 72% of the trips that were just average. I don't care much for average. To me average sucks, but when I compare average trips to trips that really sucked, average starts looking better. Getting skunked sucks. Catching thirty to fifty fish or more in shore but not getting a big one is average. Offshore ten fish can be closer to average. The trips I feel that sucked were not all skunks but dang close.

So without rambling on too much you have a 25% change of having a great trip fishing with me. I haven't talked to many other guides about this, but that may be a good percentage to keep in mind. Since I am going to be blown out for the next two days with this front, I may just have to put together something about trips I thought were great and trips my customers thought were great.

Marathon in the Florida Keys should be your next fishing vacation destination. Join us for charter fishing, fishing guide trips or our fishing 101 so you can fish on your own with better success.

Tight lines,

Capt. Dallas