People do not stall because fishing is hard. They stall because they are running nine experiments at once and cannot read any of them.

The usual advice for someone starting out is to learn everything: knots, water, depth, speed, weather, species, gear, all of it, from the first trip. That is the reason so many people plateau around trip three and decide they are unlucky.

This runs the other way. Every trip has one job, and every trip has a Not this trip list — the things you are actively allowed to be bad at for now. It feels wrong the first couple of times. It is the whole reason it works.

How a trip is built

One learning objective. What to prepare before you leave, and what to deliberately leave at home. The single thing to watch. Two or three decisions you will actually face on the day, each with what either answer tells you — because there is usually no wrong choice, only a choice you did or did not learn from. Three questions to answer before the day turns into a story. Then a gate.

The gate is stated as something observable: not do you understand depth but can you name your two depths in terms someone else could copy. Meet it and you move on. Miss it and the trip repeats with exactly one thing changed, named in the brief. A repeat is the course working. The only failure available here is moving past a gate you did not meet, because everything above it then rests on nothing.

Who it is for

The stretch between a first licence and knowing why you did what you did. It suits someone who can get out roughly fortnightly, across a season or two — there is no schedule and nothing expires.

Who should not buy it

If you already fish deliberately — change one thing, record it, compare it against last time — you are past this.

What is in it

Ten full trip briefs, each with its objective, preparation, exclusion list, decision prompts, review questions, gate, repeat variant and the one thing it hands to the next trip.
A progress instrument that tracks gates, refuses to pretend you have skipped one, and fills in a capability map as you go.
Three diagrams: why nine arrows beat no one, the ten steps and their gates, and what actually happens when a gate is missed.
A capability map page for the front of a notebook — what you can do afterwards without being told.

Format, offline and printing

Two files. The course itself is a single self-contained web page — it opens in any browser on any device, the brand faces are embedded in the file, and once it is on your phone it works with no signal at all. There is no app, no account and no server: your gates and notes stay in that browser, on that device, and you can export a JSON copy whenever you want one.

The print edition is 26 pages at US Letter, laid out for a cheap printer. Each trip prints as its own card, sized to fold into a pocket so the phone can stay in the bag. It is readable in grayscale because nothing in it decides anything by color alone, and the type is set at field sizes rather than desk sizes.

Where it sits beside the free work

The ten objectives are published free at First 10 Trips and stay that way. What is paid is everything that turns a list of objectives into a course: the briefs, the exclusion lists, the decisions, the gates, the repeat logic and the record.

What ten trips will not do

It will not make you catch fish, and nothing here is scored on whether you did. Ten sessions is not enough to learn a water, a species or a season — it is enough to build the method you learn all three with. Licensing, access and safety stay yours to check with your own state agency before every trip; Trip 09 is built around doing that properly.

Version 1.0 · September 2026 · Edition hth.field.first-10-trips

Your purchase includes

First 10 Trips — the course, a self-contained web page that works offline and tracks your gates.
The Letter print edition, 26 pages: all ten trip cards plus the capability map.
Eligible corrections and updates to the same Edition, at no further cost.

You may

Read and print it on your own devices, as often as you like.
Use its methods and working pages in your own work.
If you guide, teach or work with clients: use it while serving them, and hand a client a completed output you produced with it.

You may not

Redistribute the publication, the blank working masters or the print file.
Resell or republish it, or put the complete work in a shared library or community drive.
Share your purchase credential in place of a purchase, or use the work for model-training ingestion.

Refunds

Fourteen days, no reason required. A broken, missing or materially misdescribed file is corrected or refunded without relying on that cutoff. Terms of Sale

field course

First 10 Trips — The Field Course