Trips planned around
the season, not the calendar

Outdoor trips fail in a specific way. Everything is booked correctly, everyone arrives, and the fish aren't running — or the snow hasn't come, or the boat can't leave the harbour. The logistics were fine. The timing wasn't.

That's the part I plan for first. Where you're going gets decided after we work out what you want to catch, ski, or see, and when that's actually happening.

Fly fishing and lodge trips

Good fishing lodges are small, and the weeks that matter book a long way out — often a year or more for the prime runs. The rooms aren't the constraint; the guides are. A lodge with twelve beds and six guides can only fish so many people at once, and the best weeks go to whoever asked first.

Beyond the booking window, the details that decide the trip are unglamorous:

• Licences and permits, which vary by state or country and occasionally by the specific water.
• Guide-to-angler ratios — two anglers per guide fishes very differently from three.
• Gear: what the lodge supplies, what you're expected to bring, and what's worth shipping ahead rather than flying with.
• Getting there, which often means a float plane or a long transfer that has to be scheduled around a commercial arrival with no margin.

Alaska

Alaska covers an enormous range of trips under one name — a cruise with shore excursions, a remote fishing lodge, or a land-based trip built around a specific run or a specific species. They're planned almost nothing alike.

The season is short and the good operators sell out, so Alaska rewards deciding early. It also rewards being honest up front about the pace you want: some of these trips are genuinely strenuous, and some are comfortable enough for three generations to do together. Both exist. They're just not the same booking.

Ski trips

Ski weeks are a scheduling problem more than a destination problem. Holiday weeks cost roughly double and ski roughly half as well as the quiet weeks on either side, and the difference between ski-in lodging and a ten-minute shuttle is the difference between three runs before lunch and one.

For mixed-ability groups — some skiing hard, some barely skiing — the resort choice matters far more than people expect. Getting that right is usually worth more than any deal on the room rate.

Deep-sea and offshore

Charters are weather-dependent in a way most travel isn't, so these trips get built with slack in them: a spare day, a clear cancellation policy, and something worth doing ashore if the boat can't run. Booking a single charter day at the end of a trip with no buffer is the most common way to end up with no fishing at all.

What this costs

My planning comes at no additional cost to you — I'm paid by the lodges, resorts, and suppliers when you book through me. You can read more about how that works on the how it works page.