About

USTideCharts started as a tool for one question: should I go fishing today, and when. It scores tide movement, time of day, moon phase, wind, and water temperature for every spot it covers, and tells you the best two-hour windows.

The obvious next question is what to bring. That is this store. Every product page here connects back to conditions, what the gear is for, and when it earns its place in your bag.

We are a small operation, so we do not pretend to carry everything. What we carry is chosen against a specific coastline: California surf and bays, where the fish are halibut, surfperch, corbina, calico, and spotted bay bass. Most of what we stock is chosen against that water. We also carry a freshwater bass and crappie range, and a Great Lakes trolling range, because our suppliers are strong there and plenty of you fish both, every product is tagged for the water it suits, so you can shop yours and ignore the rest.

Two rules govern the catalog. First, anything we call saltwater gear has to meet salt-facing specs, sealed bearings, plated hooks, anodized aluminum. Untreated hardware fails in one season, and we will not sell it to you as something it isn’t. Where a manufacturer publishes no saltwater rating, the product page says so and the item is tagged freshwater, however tempting it would be to stay quiet about it. Second, if we think a product is a bad buy, we say so on the page rather than quietly leaving it out. Most of the small items here carry a note telling you not to buy them on their own, they cost nearly as much to ship as they do to make, and they only earn their price riding along in a bigger box. And our coolers page explains why we don’t stock the big rotomolded hard coolers everyone else pushes: they cost more to freight than they do to make.

Right now we source from established manufacturers and ship from their warehouses. Over time the plan is to move the categories where it matters most, braid, hooks, rig kits, and soft plastics, onto our own specifications, so we control the hook plating and the color palette rather than accepting whatever a generic supplier ships.

Questions about gear, an order, or a spot you think we should cover on the tide site: contact us.