Privacy Policy

Information We Collect

Best Days to Fish is designed with privacy in mind. We collect minimal information necessary to provide the fishing forecast service. Ordering a custom trip plan is the one part of the site that collects anything about you as a person, and it collects only what writing your plan needs:

Location Information

To provide localized forecasts, we need to know your location. You can provide this in two ways:

• ZIP Code: You can enter a U.S. ZIP code, which we use to look up coordinates via the Zippopotam.us service
• Browser Geolocation: With your permission, we can use your browser's location feature to determine your coordinates

Important: Your saved location preference stays in your browser's local storage. When a forecast completes, we also record the requested forecast's ZIP code, city, and state when available in our self-hosted analytics. This describes the place being forecast, which may differ from where you are visiting from. Exact coordinates are not sent to analytics.

Server Logs

Like most web services, our servers may automatically collect standard log information including IP addresses, browser type, and access times. This data is used solely for service maintenance and security purposes and is not linked to any personal information.

Trip Plan Orders

If you order a custom trip plan, you first submit your name, email, destination, fishing dates, target species, and fishing method. We store these basic details with your Stripe order. After payment, we review suitability within 24 hours and manually send a full questionnaire, clarify essential details, or decline and refund. We keep:

• Your email address, the one you write from, so our questions and the link to your plan have somewhere to go
• Your name, supplied on the initial form. It is used only so our emails can address you, and it never appears on the plan
• The brief: where you are setting out from, your dates and hours, the fish you are after, how you fish, your drive and walking limits, your gear, and anything you tell us about footing or mobility. This is the plan's subject matter, and it is what the author writes to
• Stripe's record of the payment. We never see or hold your card number. What we see is that a payment succeeded, for how much, and the email you gave Stripe
• What you tell us after the trip, if you choose to. Post-trip feedback is optional

What is not asked: no account, no password, no phone number, no home address, no date of birth. There is no login to create and nothing to cancel.

How We Use Your Information

Your location information is used exclusively to:

• Calculate solunar feeding periods specific to your longitude
• Fetch local weather forecasts from Open-Meteo
• Retrieve tide predictions from the nearest NOAA station (coastal areas)
• Identify which lake or river you are on
• Read water temperature, river flow and water quality from nearby USGS, NOAA and Corps of Engineers sources, or model the water temperature where none reports
• Convert coordinates to city/state names for display

We do not use your location for advertising, profiling, or any purpose other than providing the fishing forecast service.

A Trip Plan Order

What you tell us in your brief is used to:

• Write your plan, which is the whole point of asking
• Email you about that one order: that the brief arrived, the link, and anything we need to ask before writing
• Refresh the plan as your dates come into forecast range
• Compare what the forecast predicted against what you report, if you report anything, so the model gets better

It is never used for advertising. It is never sold, rented, or shared with anyone beyond the payment and email services named below, and those two receive only what they need to take a payment and deliver a message.

Third-Party Services

To build a forecast we ask the services below for data about your location. Most of them receive your coordinates. Some receive only the ID of a station or dam we picked near you from a list we keep, and the search box sends what you type. Each card says which.

Each of these services has their own privacy policies. We encourage you to review them if you have concerns about how they handle location data.

If You Order a Trip Plan

Two more services are involved, and only for an order. Browsing the forecast reaches neither of them.

Cookies and Local Storage

We do not use tracking cookies or advertising cookies.

We use browser local storage to save your location preference so you don't have to re-enter it each time you visit. This data:

• Remains in your browser as a saved preference
• Contains only your ZIP code, coordinates, and city/state name
• Can be cleared at any time through your browser settings
• Is not shared for advertising; completed forecasts separately report ZIP, city, and state to our self-hosted analytics

The pre-payment trip form keeps your contact and trip details, selected plan, and agreement checkbox in this tab's session storage so they can be restored when you return from Stripe. This draft expires after 24 hours of inactivity and is removed when this tab reaches a server-verified payment confirmation. Use “Clear saved details” to remove it sooner. These drafts do not sync between tabs or devices and are excluded from analytics. If storage is unavailable, the form warns that details may not survive the return from checkout.

The full trip questionnaire also saves an unfinished draft in this browser, including your answers, selected fishing area, and current step. It does not sync between devices or go to our researcher until you send it. Drafts expire after seven days without changes; we discard expired drafts when you return. Use “Clear draft and start over” or your browser settings to remove one sooner. A confirmed submission removes the local draft. Final consent is never restored as checked. If browser storage is unavailable, the form explains that autosave is unavailable and still lets you complete and send it.

Stripe sets its own cookies on its own payment domain to process the payment and detect fraud. That happens on Stripe's page under Stripe's policy, not on ours.

Trip-plan promotions save a campaign identifier, display or dismissal preferences, and whether checkout was started in this browser. Seasonal preferences stop applying when the campaign ends. A clicked offer can also save its campaign and placement for seven days so we can count which public offers lead to orders. These records contain no trip answers or contact details. Clear browser storage to remove them sooner. Automatic exit invitations stay off when these preferences cannot be saved.

Contact Messages

When you use our contact form, we receive your reply email, optional name, selected topic, and the details you send. We use them to handle your question or request. Messages travel through Resend to our Forward Email inbox and any configured forwarding destination. They may remain in those mailboxes and provider delivery records while we handle the conversation; they are not added to a marketing list. You can request deletion through the privacy topic on the form.

The contact form does not save a local draft or send its contents to analytics. The contact page is excluded from analytics and offline page caching. Hosting services may keep ordinary security and access logs. Form delivery includes basic spam checks and request limits.

Analytics

To understand which pages are useful and how many people visit, we run Umami, an open-source analytics tool that we host ourselves. It is cookieless and it does not fingerprint you or follow you to other sites.

It records page views, referring site, approximate visitor country or region, browser, and screen size. Completed forecast events also include the requested forecast's five-digit ZIP code, city, and state when the forecast provides them. These fields help us understand which places people request. Missing postal or city information is omitted. We do not send exact latitude/longitude, street addresses, names, email addresses, or the contents of your saved-location list to analytics.

Forecast events also record the selected species, how the request was opened (for example, ZIP search or a saved spot), and whether it was a refresh or a new search. Request starts, completion times, and fixed failure categories help us find reliability problems. Failed requests do not include the requested ZIP, city, state, raw search text, or error message.

On public pages, we also measure loading speed, interaction responsiveness, and unexpected layout shifts. These performance records include the public landing page, screen size, browser language, and numerical measurements. They do not include what you type or click, element text, screenshots, recordings, or exact forecast coordinates. Private trip-plan pages and the contact form are excluded. The analytics preference below also disables performance reporting.

Because we host it, this data sits on our own server rather than with an advertising company. It is never sold, and it is never shared for advertising.

All trip-plan child pages, including initial intake, questionnaires, confirmations, delivered plans, and public samples, are excluded from analytics. Questionnaire answers, contact details, payment references, and private link tokens are never sent to analytics. Public-page analytics omits query strings and records only the external referring domain, such as google.com. Referring page paths, query strings, and fragments are excluded. Public offer views, clicks, and plan choices use fixed campaign, placement, layout-version, and destination-category labels to compare which offers are useful. Only completed forecast events include the forecast ZIP, city, and state; other public events omit those fields. Orders can carry the same fixed campaign labels internally for aggregate sales measurement. Personalized links contain an authenticated, encrypted order reference that expires after 30 days. Anyone with that private link can view the prefilled basic information, so keep it private. These pages are not indexed or stored in our offline cache. Hosting and email providers may keep operational access and delivery logs under their policies.

Data Retention

The forecast maintains no user accounts and retains no personal information. Server logs are automatically rotated and deleted according to standard hosting practices. Your location preference in local storage persists until you clear your browser data or manually reset it.

A trip plan brief, and anything you report after the trip, is kept for as long as the plan exists. There are two reasons, and they are the reasons you would want: the plan is refreshed as your dates come into forecast range, which needs the brief it was written to, and what you report is compared against what the forecast predicted so the model improves.

Payment records stay with Stripe under Stripe's own retention policy, because that is a financial record rather than ours to delete. You can ask us to remove a brief and its notes at any time, at our privacy contact form. What that means in practice is described under Your Rights.

Children's Privacy

The forecast is a general audience service, and it collects no personal information from anyone, so there is no children's data in it to address. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

Custom trip plans are sold to adults. Ordering one requires confirming that you are 18 or older, and we do not knowingly accept an order from anyone younger. A brief may well describe fishing with a child, because who is in the boat changes the plan, and we ask for no identifying detail about them.

Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Clear your location: Click "Reset to General US" in the location picker or clear your browser's local storage
• Use without location: View general forecasts without providing your specific location
• Block geolocation: Deny browser geolocation permission and enter a ZIP code instead

If you have ordered a trip plan, you can also:

• See what we hold: the brief is printed at the bottom of your own plan page, which is the whole of it
• Correct it: write to us and we will fix it, and where it changed the plan we will say what changed
• Have it removed: your plan page comes down and the brief and any notes go with it. Payment records stay with Stripe under its own policy, so the honest wording is removed from the site and from our working files rather than erased from the world

Send all three requests through our privacy contact form, using the email address you ordered with.

California Privacy Rights (CCPA)

If you are a California resident, you have specific rights regarding your personal information under the California Consumer Privacy Act. Using the forecast collects no personal information at all, so for that part of the site there is nothing to access, delete, or opt out of.

Ordering a trip plan collects your email address and the brief. We do not sell it and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is no sale to opt out of. Your rights to know what we hold, to have it deleted, and to have it corrected are honored as described under Your Rights, at no charge and without being treated differently for asking.

International Users

Best Days to Fish is designed for U.S. locations and is hosted in the United States. If you access the service from outside the U.S., please be aware that any location data you provide will be processed in the United States.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify users of any material changes by updating the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

Contact

Questions about this Privacy Policy, or a request about a trip plan brief, go to our privacy contact form. The site itself is at bestdaystofish.com.