About Reggie Thompson

I've been fishing since I was three or four years old. My family has a cabin on a lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — my son will be the fifth generation to fish it. That's not a flex. It's just context for why this isn't a hobby I picked up from YouTube.

Where I Fish

Most of my fishing life has happened on that UP lake. Largemouth and smallmouth bass, bluegill, yellow perch, the occasional northern pike. I know that water the way you know a place you've been going to your whole life — which spots hold fish in July, which ones go cold by August, where the weeds are thick enough to tangle a Rapala at 11 PM.

Beyond the UP, I've done walleye trips to Canada with family and friends more times than I can count. A week on the water, walleye every meal. My cousin and I used to sit in the back of the boat playing Game Boys while the adults fished. Now I'm one of the adults.

I live in the Bay Area now, in Dublin, California. Out here I fish the Sierra Nevada — alpine lakes and streams, wild trout, sometimes backpacking in. I also practice fly casting at the Golden Gate Park casting ponds, which is an underrated resource and a strange thing to explain to non-fishing friends.

What I Fish With

For bass in the UP, my go-to is still a Rapala. Simple, proven, and tied to enough good memories that I'm probably not objective. My baitcasting setup uses my dad's old Shimano rod — sentimental reasons, mostly, but it still works fine.

I came to fly fishing in my 30s, which meant rewiring a casting instinct built on baitcasting. The hardest thing was genuinely understanding that you're casting the line, not the fly. That sounds obvious. It isn't, until it clicks. I fish an Orvis setup for trout, and I'm still working on reading streams well — figuring out where trout are actually holding is something I get better at slowly.

Why I Built TackleHaul

Every time I'm about to buy a reel or a rod, I end up checking four or five retailer tabs. Bass Pro, FishUSA, Tackle Warehouse, Amazon. The price on the same product varies by $20, $40, sometimes more — and there's no single place that shows you all of them at once.

That's the problem TackleHaul is solving. A fishing gear price comparison engine, the kind that shows you current prices across all the major retailers side by side, with price history so you can tell whether a “sale” is actually a sale. It's the tool I wanted before I built it.

I'm not a gear head or a tournament angler. I'm a recreational fisherman who's been at it for thirty years and still thinks too much before a purchase. That's the perspective I write from.

Contact: hello@tacklehaul.com