About TackleChoice

Who runs TackleChoice

I'm Mo McCarran, and I run TackleChoice. I'm a beginner angler and still learning.

When I started, the gear decisions were the hard part. What hook, what line, what rod — every one of those has a different answer depending on the species, the bait, the technique and the water, and the answers are scattered across forum threads that mostly disagree with each other. I built these tools because I wanted those decisions in one place, worked through properly, for anyone starting out the way I did.

So I am not the expert here, and nothing on the site rests on years on the water. The recommendations come from researched information and explicit rules, and the process is the part I will stand behind: sources are opened and read rather than taken from search snippets, and recorded with the date they were checked. Every recommendation traces back to a specific rule. If one looks wrong, I would rather go and investigate it than defend the tool. The methodology page sets out what that does and does not amount to.

What this is

TackleChoice is a fishing utility website for anglers in the United States. You tell it what you are fishing for and how, and it gives you a rod, reel, line, leader and hook recommendation as practical ranges, with the reasoning behind each one.

The fishing kayak guides and the Kayak Finder compare fifteen kayaks on the specifications their manufacturers publish. They are spec comparisons, not hands-on reviews or ratings: TackleChoice has not paddled, pedaled or bought these kayaks.

It is free to use and works on a phone at the ramp.

Who it is for

Anyone standing in a tackle aisle or packing the truck who wants a straight answer rather than a forum thread. It is most useful if you are new to a species, new to a technique, or buying a setup for water you have not fished before.

If you have been fishing a lake for twenty years, you already know more about it than this site does. The tools are a starting point, not a correction.

How the recommendations are made

Every answer comes from a deterministic rules engine running over a structured database of fishing knowledge: species baselines, technique demands, bait requirements, water type and experience level, combined in a fixed order, with hand-written rules for the combinations where that arithmetic falls short.

The engine that produces those answers is not a language model, and no product feed influences its output. The same inputs always give the same answer, and when something is wrong it can be traced to a specific row and fixed. The methodology page explains it in full, including where the information comes from and what the label on each result means.

What we deliberately do not do

• No borrowed authority. No claim of professional angling credentials, expert review or years on the water, because there are none. The claim is that the rules are explicit, the sources are recorded, and both are correctable.
• No fake reviews or ratings. There are none on the site, and there will not be.
• No invented statistics. Where a figure varies by brand — hook gap, reel capacity, line diameter — it is stored and shown as a typical range, labeled as such.
• No pages built to catch search traffic. Every page here exists because it answers something. We are not generating species-by-state-by-season combinations.
• No advertising. See privacy for details about site data and contact messages.

Corrections

If a recommendation here is wrong, it is wrong because of a specific rule, and that rule can be changed. We would rather know. Tell us what looks wrong and say which species, technique and bait you picked, so we can find the rule that produced it.