TripsQuick is a free reference for people who fish. These terms explain what we do, what we do not do, and what you should never rely on us for. They are written to be read, not to be skipped.
What TripsQuick is
We publish one page per body of water. On it you will find depth charts, the fish species recorded there, boat ramps, waterside campgrounds, stocking records, water-quality readings and an hourly bite forecast. Everything is assembled from public registries — chiefly the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, NOAA, state wildlife agencies, the Water Quality Portal and Recreation.gov.
The site is free. There is nothing to buy, nothing to book and no account to create. We do not take payments, sell tackle, arrange guides or reserve campsites. Where an official booking page exists, we link to it and the booking happens there, under that operator's terms.
Never navigate by our depth charts
This is the most important sentence on this page. Our depth charts are built for finding fish, not for taking a boat through. They are assembled from public surveys that have known gaps: some soundings are decades old, shoals shift, water levels change, and a survey that stops at the edge of a channel tells you nothing about what lies beyond it.
For navigation, use official nautical charts and current notices to mariners. If you run aground while steering by a page on this site, that is a use we have told you not to make of it.
Fishing rules are set by the state, not by us
Licences, open seasons, size and bag limits, gear restrictions, catch-and-release zones and temporary closures are decided by the state wildlife agency and change without warning. We do not publish them, and where we mention them we may be out of date.
Before you fish, check the current regulations with the agency for that state. Nothing here is legal advice, and a page on this site is not a defence if you break a rule.
Your safety is your own
Fishing and boating carry real risk: weather turns, water is cold, banks are slippery, and remote water is far from help. We describe places; we do not inspect them, and we have not been to most of them. Decide for yourself whether conditions are safe on the day, tell someone where you are going, and carry what you need to get back.
What the bite forecast is — and what it is not
The forecast weighs pressure and its trend, wind, cloud cover, air and water temperature and the moon phase, hour by hour, and shows which factor helped and which hurt. It is an estimate built from weather data. It is not a promise that fish will bite, and no method of computing one exists. Treat a high score as a reason to prefer one morning over another, not as a guarantee.
How accurate the data is
- Depth surveys change rarely and some are decades old. Each water page shows the survey date and the source. Where no survey exists we leave the field empty rather than guess — an invented depth is worse than none.
- Stocking records follow the state's own publication schedule, which is usually annual. A fish stocked last week will not appear until the state publishes it.
- Water chemistry — oxygen, clarity, temperature — is refreshed monthly from the Water Quality Portal. A single reading describes one spot on one day, not the whole lake.
- Ramps and campgrounds come from official registries. Fees, hours and closures change faster than the registries do; call ahead if it matters.
- Shorelines are drawn from public hydrography and, where that is coarse, from OpenStreetMap. The source is recorded on each water.
- Descriptions are written with the help of language models from the data above and edited by a person before publication. Mistakes are possible; tell us and we will fix them.
Photographs, text and licences
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and other open archives. Each one keeps its author and its licence, shown on the page. If you reuse a photograph, you take it under its own licence and you honour its terms, not ours.
Data from USGS, NOAA and state agencies is in the public domain. Data from OpenStreetMap is licensed under the ODbL and must be attributed accordingly. Our own writing, page structure and depth-band rendering belong to us.
Using the site
Read it, print a page, send a link, quote a paragraph with a link back — all fine. What we ask you not to do: pull the site in bulk in a way that degrades it for others, republish our texts wholesale as your own, or present our data as an official source. If you want the underlying data, go to the registries we name — they are public and they are better placed to give it to you.
Links to other sites
We link to state agencies, booking systems, photograph sources and map data. Those sites have their own terms and their own privacy practices, and we do not control what they publish or how they behave.
Availability
The service is free and offered as it is. We may change, move or remove pages, and we may stop the service. We do not promise that the site will be reachable at any particular moment.
Liability
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss or harm arising from the use of this site — including decisions made on the basis of a depth chart, a forecast, a species record or a description. You use the information at your own judgement and risk.
Changes to these terms
We may update this page. The version published here is the one that applies. If a change is substantial we will say so on the page itself rather than hope you notice.
Contact
Questions about these terms, corrections to data, or a request to take something down: [email protected]. We read everything and we answer.
