Christoph Ballmer, who builds and checks howsthebite

About

Who's behind this

I'm Christoph Ballmer. I build howsthebite, I wrote the engine that runs it, and I'm the one who reads the agency pages.

Where this comes from

I've fished for over ten years, and I fish on my trips to the States. But that isn't really why this site exists.

It exists because every time I wanted to know whether it was worth driving out, the answer was a page someone had updated in March and forgotten. The state agency had put its reports on hold. The booking sites had angler photos and a charter list. Nobody was showing the one thing that actually decides it: what the water is doing this morning, and where that number came from.

So I built the thing I wanted. Every night it pulls the gauge readings from USGS, the weather and pressure trend from NOAA, and works out the solunar windows from the moon and sun positions. Then it writes 175 reports and rebuilds the site. No one types a number in by hand.

What I'll never do to you

Make a number up

If a water has no gauge, the page says so. If a reading is old, it's marked old. Every value carries the station it came from and the minute it was read.

Round a bad day up

A 2 out of 10 gets the same headline treatment as a 9. Telling you it's worth going when it isn't costs you a morning, and costs me you.

Guess at the rules

Licence pages carry fines. Where an agency doesn't state something plainly, I leave it open and say so rather than fill the gap from somewhere else. There are such gaps on those pages right now, and they're labelled.

The licence pages

I read 42 state agencies myself, wrote down the date, and listed every page I read. Each one shows when it was last checked and when the next check is due — those dates are tracked, not decorative.

The agency is always the one that counts. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice. Where my page and the agency differ, the agency is right, and I'd like to hear about it.

Elsewhere

I've been running fishing portals in German for years — the same discipline, a different market.

Formal tickets, for what they're worth on a data site:

Profiles you can check: linkedin.com · xing.com

Found something wrong?

A price that's changed, a gauge reading that looks off, a rule I've got backwards — tell me and I'll fix it. Getting it right matters more here than looking right.