Should You Cancel Your Trip?
What's the forecast? Are we going to get good weather? Every guide hears those questions, and the weather is the one thing no guide controls. You picked the date off a calendar a year ago. Nobody could have known the weather then, and a 10-day forecast barely knows it now.
A 10-day forecast is good at one thing: telling you a front is coming. It is bad at telling you when. A front due Saturday afternoon can blow through Friday night or stall until Sunday. That's why one day on the water is a gamble. Fish two or three days and the odds that the weather lines up for part of your trip go way up.
Trust the forecast at three days
Personally, I don't put much faith in a forecast until it's three days out. That's why the wind, rain and cloud forecasts in TidalMap stop at 72 hours. Inside that window the timing gets good enough to plan around, and you can watch the wind at your launch hour by hour instead of reading one number for the whole county.
Windy is not the same as unfishable
There are times of year when almost every coastal fishery just blows. Eastern North Carolina is a good example. The Wright brothers came here to fly because it is one of the most consistently windy places in the lower 48.
Is that bad? Not always. This time of year a north wind helps the false albacore fishery. It blows off the land and out to sea, which leaves a strip of very fishable water right along the beach. Ask our local captains and they'll tell you some of their best days are 20 to 25 knots out of the north. It's snotty, but it's fishable with a little teamwork on the boat. (More on that in Football Season.)
Wind moves water in other fisheries too. It pushes water up onto the flats and around the islands, and it can hold water out of a marsh for a whole day. On a windy day the tide may not match the tide table, so check the live gauge before you trust the prediction.
Ask before you cancel
Call your guide before you cancel. They know the fishery, and they know how this weather plays on it. If you're fishing on your own, do what's safe. But if you never fish a windy day, you'll never find out how good one can be.
There's always plan B
Fish a farm pond. Chase bass between the cypress knees. Get creative, but get on the water.
– Greg Barnes