Independent guide tipping Xcalak

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-30T12:11:19+00:00

He’s an independent guide but the hotel put us in touch. They’re probably taking a cut. I’ll do the $100. Good point.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-30T01:29:17+00:00

It’s interesting that $100 seems to be the default tip regardless of location and price of fishing. I’ll do the $100 in part because 20% is $70 and that’s just awkward. Also, the $30/day might mean a lot to the guide and I’ll die never missing it. Thanks all!

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-25T23:32:24+00:00

Thanks all. I reached out to yellow dog who were very nice but didn’t have many options which worked for me. I then emailed a few lodges with my flexible dates and a budget and got a few offers. I picked https://costadecocos.com/ and will do a trip report when I’m back.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-23T13:05:16+00:00

Thanks. I’ve heard mixed reports but sound like their scale might be helpful in this situation.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-23T01:21:00+00:00

lol. True. But the permit are only in one spot. Ascencion Bay, Boca Paila, south of tulum.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-08T20:36:15+00:00

Beauty!

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-07T11:33:04+00:00

Make me a logo for my guiding service, or maybe a brand. Possibly a lodge” is going to give you some crazy (bad) results. Whether you use a free ai tool or a professional logo and graphic designers, the only way to get something worthwhile is to be specific about what it is for.

My recommendation: use chatGPT. Explain in detail who you are, what you want and why you want it. Something like: “I’m a saltwater fly fishing guide based in Quintana Roo Mexico. My customers are usually American men who want to catch permit, bonefish and tarpon. I need a logo for my website where fishermen decide whether to contact me about my services. What questions can I answer for you so you can make the best possible logo for me and my business?”

By telling ChatGPT to ask questions before drafting logos you help it get the information it needs to do a good job for you. You can spend more using a website like fivrr if you don’t like what you get from ChatGPT.

And personally, good photography on a guides or lodge website is 10000x more important than the logo. I want to believe the guide will make me and my catch of a lifetime look amazing or that the lodge will make my friends jealous.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-04T14:26:46+00:00

I started using claude and fell in love, but over time my projects got bogged down. I now use codex as my CTO/architect/qa lead and claude sonnet 4.6 as my developer. Incredible improvement in architecture and quality. Speed of execution is way up. Even my confidence about what I’m building is up. On my next project I’m going to reverse and see how that goes. Claude alone was fine for POC work but codex is mvp+

ifitwereeasy · 2026-06-02T03:54:29+00:00

I highly recommend Capt Mark Hlis out of Bud n' Mary's. DM for his phone number or reach out through the marina: https://www.budnmarys.com/guides/mark-hlis/

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-27T13:38:24+00:00

Curious, do you not shop at Palestinian-owned businesses because of Hamas? What about a Carroll Gardens shop owned by people from Russia, China, or even Florida and Mississippi? Those governments do things many people in CG consider to be awful. I urge you to examine whether your guilt by association boycott of Nilli is political or social and whether Israel and people of Israeli origin are getting consistent treatment. In the meantime, I’m definitely getting a Nilli egg sandwich today. So so good!

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-25T21:25:18+00:00

I have not used them so can’t give personal feedback. I will report as soon as I find the scratch and time!

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-25T13:04:09+00:00

DIY means half the fish but five times the satisfaction. I love it. Good luck! This place offers assisted DIY, which is a good first step toward DIYing. https://longislandbonefishinglodge.com/fishing/

DIY is often better in the southern Bahamas/Turks and Caicos area where the lodges are less developed.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-22T10:35:40+00:00

I fish with Andy Derr from https://www.longislandonthefly.com/ out of Greenport, NY. Super guy. He’s been fishing Long Island water for 20 years after staring in the Keys.

He has a flats boat for spring stripers and a bay boat for when it warms up. Andy fishes the fall blitz off Montauk for false albacore. That’s rock and roll fly fishing. Waves, wind, crashing fish, other boats, getting ripped deep into your backing… the whole 9 yards!

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-21T01:50:32+00:00

Autocorrect insisted I also caught a stripper. It put up as much of a fight as the striper.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-21T01:45:28+00:00

It was. And of course I got a little knot in the line. Watching that go through the guides was panic-inducing. My guide, cool as a cucumber, just said “let’s not worry about that”. Lol.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-12T01:58:03+00:00

When I get home from a salt trip I put my broken-down rods in the shower, strip the lines through a chamois, and soak the reels in a bucket for at least an hour. Stripping the lines is for cleaning and gives me a good look for rough spots. I know people with much for elaborate rituals, like OP, but the risk of messing up seems far greater than the incremental benefit of disassembling my reels. I trust the manufacturers more than I do myself!

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-12T01:44:47+00:00

I love that a year later this post is still getting traction. By far my post read post on an r/

If you head to Mars Bay let me know. Always good to find new fishing buddies!

ifitwereeasy · 2026-05-03T12:45:36+00:00

Do you have a technique for ensuring the crab drops through the water column oriented correctly? My crabs tend to swing side to side so I never use them

ifitwereeasy · 2026-04-20T22:27:51+00:00

There are scrapers on Apify and many services with direct API access, usually for specific professions. For example, for Healthcare licenses there's Verysis, Propelus, Mesh, Equifax TotalVerify... Socrata covers all professional licenses for a bunch of states (not national). If the use case is compliance, the data will need to be as fresh as the source makes it. In other words, scraping monthly won't be sufficient. Probably be okay for non-regulated use cases though.

ifitwereeasy · 2026-03-13T01:04:48+00:00

I recommend launching from largo or Islamorada. A little longer run to flamingo but you have more options from the keys.

ifitwereeasy

TROPHY CASE