Cookies

What we do not do

No advertising cookies. No tracking pixels. No device fingerprinting. Nothing that follows you between sites or builds a profile of you.

You can read every page on this site — the map, the search, the trip planner, every water — without an account and without a cookie. You can report a mistake or add a water anonymously too.

Five things do need an account, and signing in for them sets a cookie. It is listed below, with how long it lasts.

Signing in sets a cookie

Five things need an account: saving waters to a list of your own, keeping a record of the waters you have fished, adding a photograph, logging a catch, and looking after a club’s pages if you run a club.

If you sign in to do one of those, your browser is given a session cookie. It keeps you signed in between pages and does nothing else. It is not shared with anybody and it is not used to work out where you have been.

Two details worth having straight. It can arrive as two cookies rather than one, because the sign-in token is sometimes too long for a single one and is split. And it lasts a long time: signing out clears it, and if you never sign out your browser keeps it for up to 400 days, which is what keeps you signed in between visits.

This is what the law calls a strictly necessary cookie: without it, signing in would not work at all. That is why there is no banner asking you to accept it — there is no version of “signed in” that does not need it.

Everything else on this site still sets nothing. Reading the site and contributing to it both work without an account and without a cookie.

Every cookie this site sets

Two kinds, and only in situations you put yourself in. Neither is set for somebody reading the site.

• Your sign-in session, if you create an account. It holds the token that keeps you signed in, so that your saved waters follow you rather than living in one browser. Set when you sign in, cleared when you sign out, and otherwise kept for up to 400 days. Sometimes split across two cookies because the token is long. It is readable by scripts on this site, which is how the pages that need it read it, and it identifies you to this site and to nothing else.
• A moderation key, if you sign in to moderate the site. It is limited to the moderation pages, cannot be read by page scripts at all, and expires after twelve hours. If you are not a moderator it is never set.

Those are the ones we set. A bot check in front of the site can set one of its own if it ever challenges you, which is not something we control or can read.

Why nothing asks you to accept these

Both cookies above are what the rules call strictly necessary: each one does the thing you asked for and nothing else. Neither is used to measure you, profile you, or follow you anywhere. A strictly necessary cookie does not need consent, which is why nothing asks you to accept these two.

The counting described under Analytics below does not use a cookie, and there is a switch for it at the foot of this page.

What is stored on your device

Four things are kept in your browser’s own storage. None of them reaches us. The first three say nothing about you. The fourth is the pages you asked this site to save.

If you sketch a stretch on the map to suggest it, that shape is held in your browser’s session storage for the moment it takes you to move on to the form that describes it. It never leaves your device, we cannot read it, and it is gone when you close the tab.

If you leave the map and come back, where you were looking is held in your browser’s session storage, so that “back to the map” returns you to the view you left rather than to the start. It is read once as the map reopens and cleared immediately, and it is gone when you close the tab.

If you turn the counting off with the switch at the foot of this page, that choice is kept in your browser’s local storage. It has to be: a preference not to be counted cannot be honoured without being remembered. It says nothing about you beyond that you asked.

If you ask for a water to be kept for reading without a signal, whole pages are stored on your device: the permission, the price, the way in, and the date each was checked, along with the photographs and the map tiles that cover it. That is a record of which waters you saved, held on your device and nowhere else, and we cannot read it. A saved page always shows the date it was saved, because a price from three weeks ago must not be read as today’s. Pages you merely read are capped at 50 megabytes and dropped after a week; waters you saved on purpose are kept until you remove them, and your offline waters lists them, says how much room they take and removes any of them.

Checking where you are standing stores nothing. Your position is read by your browser, compared with the boundary on your device, and discarded; it never reaches this site.

The filters are the one thing that is not storage. If you filter the map they go into the address bar — so that a filtered view is a link you can send to somebody. That puts them in your browser history, like any page you visit, and nowhere else.

Nothing else is kept. Nothing on our side records which water you opened, or that you have been here before.

Analytics

We use Umami, a cookieless analytics product. It counts page views and a handful of actions — a report filed, a water submitted, a search that found nothing — with no cookies, no profile of you, and no way to follow you to another site. It is told your IP address, which it uses to work out which country a visit came from and does not keep. UK law allows this without asking you first, provided we say so and make objecting easy: the switch at the foot of the cookie notice stops it for this browser, and a browser sending a do-not-track signal is never sent the script.

Map tiles and hosting

Map images are loaded from the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and the lettering on them from OpenMapTiles. Both necessarily see your IP address in order to send you anything — as does any site you load anything from, including this one — and which tiles you ask for says roughly where you are looking. Details of waters are stored with Supabase, our database host, which also holds account emails.

More detail, including what we keep and for how long, is in the privacy notice.

Version 2.1 — effective 6 October 2026.