Since its inception in 2002, Fishful Thinker LLC has been a company focussed on angler education. While we try to produce entertaining TV shows, radio segments, seminars, written pieces, and especially guided trips, make no mistake…the goal is to educate and to do so in a fun enough format that we don’t bore you while you soak it in. Our shows are not fast-paced, loud, flashy or adorned with fancy motion graphics, and our fishing is always filmed at places you can realistically visit. Sure, I’d love to teach you how to fish for peacock bass in the Amazon jungle, but let’s keep it real.

As Fishful Thinker TV, Season 18 is poised to debut on Altitude Sports Channel, I feel it’s important to assure you, ‘Thinkers, that our motives have not changed; once again, we will fish public waters using proven techniques with the goal of sharing how we caught our fish that day. The episodes are produced in the order the fish are actually caught using long, natural clips so that you can see what actually happened…not some edited together sequence of a fancy cast, some sweet rod working, a Bassmaster approved hookset, a fish landing shot, all of course followed by a dramatic release shot. While that might produce a cinematic product that is fun to watch, it won’t teach you anything because, like most of TV, it isn’t what actually happens. Call it fake news.

My favorite emails to receive are from folks saying they learned something new, remembered something they’d forgotten, or were motivated to try something they saw on our show. Same with Fishful Thinker produced seminars; all of the Fishful guides host seminars and we work hard to make them as informative, relevant, and useful as possible. Our guided trips focus solely on education, so much so that we don’t keep fish. We are not your grocery shopper and will not give you a fish; we will however, teach you how to catch your own fish. What you do with them from there is your business, not ours. For the record, we strongly believe in the concept of selective harvest.

Do we include talk of rods, reels, lines, lures and all that? Of course. Some will view this as a sales pitch and condemn us for it. To them I say sorry but not sorry because, let’s be honest; tackle selection is a major part of angling success. To those that watch with an open mind, understand that if you use the products that we do in ways we use them, they will work for you. The products we use in our content have been thoroughly vetted for quality and performance, and tested for their best applications. We sincerely hope to help you maximize your angling budget by making proven buying choices. Tackle selection details are a small but critical part of our show, and we routinely answer emails asking for more details about specific tackle. Considering new tackle and have a question before you spend your money? Email it on over…we’d be glad to offer our experience and advice.

Lastly, and this is one we take a lot of heat for; we don’t do “fish porn”. We don’t cherry-pick trophy quality fish catches, we show you a cross-section of what you can actually expect to catch if you visit where we did. Sometimes we catch giants, sometimes we catch dinks, usually we catch the fat part of the population bell curve…the same you can expect to catch if you employ some solid angling skills. Our shows are filmed in a three to six hour window of fishing, not edited together from days on end of trophy hunting. Truthfully, my ego would love to fish for three days and rack up enough genuine giants to produce the kind of TV show that makes viewers wonder out loud why they don’t catch fish like that every time they hit the water…but that is not the real world of angling. If nothing else, we keep it real.

So, on the eve of our 18th season on TV, 234 episodes after launching FTTV, I feel confident that, though we buck the trend in outdoor TV by not producing fast-paced and fancy fluff, I am confident that what we produce will help you catch more fish, and that’s all I’m worried about. Hopefully you’ll agree and continue to tune in, and to those that do, I wholeheartedly say thank you. Fish big, ‘Thinkers…fish big.