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Jimenez Julien, the person who answers when you write to TransomBooking

Founder, product lead and the one who picks up the phone when a captain says the deposit did not go through.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien

Why a software publisher ended up writing float plans

I am Jimenez Julien. I publish TransomBooking through MLJ, SASU, and I have spent the last several years building narrow, unglamorous software for trades that run on their feet rather than at a desk. Charter fishing found me the way most of these projects do: through a complaint that nobody had bothered to solve.

A captain out of the Gulf coast told me he had lost a Saturday party of six because his wall calendar said one thing and his phone said another. He had no card on file, so the loss was total: fuel burned getting the boat ready, bait bought the night before, a mate who drove in for nothing. He then explained, almost as an afterthought, that he had also gone out that morning without telling anyone ashore who was aboard. Two problems, one root cause. Everything about that trip lived in his head, and his head was busy running a boat.

I spent the following months in harbors instead of in meetings. I rode along on half day inshore runs and full day offshore trips. I stood in dock offices while somebody tried to reconcile a season of cash, checks and half remembered promises. I listened to a lot of 5 a.m. phone calls, and I learned that the moment when everything gets decided is short: a caller has you on the line for maybe ninety seconds and in that window you either take the date, take the card and record who is coming, or you lose all three.

That is the whole design brief for TransomBooking. One screen, used with a thumb, that finishes a booking completely. The date comes off the board, the deposit is authorized on the caller's card, your written weather rule is attached to the trip with a timestamp, and the float plan builds itself out of the manifest so it can be sent ashore before the lines come off. Nothing about it asks a captain to sit down at a computer later, because later never arrives in June.

I also learned what not to build. Charter operators do not need a customer relationship suite, a loyalty program or a marketing funnel. They need the deposit to hold, the weather policy to be unarguable, the mate to know which boat he is on, and the paperwork to exist when an insurer or the Coast Guard asks for it. Every request that arrives from a captain gets weighed against that list, and plenty of good ideas get politely turned down because they would make the booking screen slower to use in the sun.

What I am accountable for is simple to state. The prices on this site are the prices you pay, billed monthly in US dollars, with no commission on your fares. The claims in the results section come from the operators running the product, not from a marketing exercise. Customer lists belong to the boat that built them and are never sold or shared. And when something breaks in the middle of a season, the reply you get comes from me, not from a ticket queue in another time zone.

Experience and expertise

I have shipped and maintained small operational products for trades where the working day starts before dawn and the tolerance for fiddly software is zero. Across those projects the pattern repeats: the money is lost in the ten minutes around a booking, not in the hours of actual work. Charter fishing has its own version of that, complicated by weather, by federal passenger limits and by the fact that the customer is often on vacation and three time zones away.

  • Ran discovery aboard six-pack charters, head boats and harbor tour vessels on the Gulf, the mid-Atlantic and the New England coast.
  • Designed the deposit model with captains who take cash at the dock, cards over the phone and prepaid gift certificates from marina desks.
  • Wrote the float plan template against the fields the Coast Guard Auxiliary and marina offices actually ask for, then simplified it until it took one tap.
  • Built the weather rule engine after sitting through four cancelled trips and hearing the same argument four different ways.
  • Handle billing, support and product decisions personally, so nobody at TransomBooking can hide behind a department.

How this product is built and maintained

TransomBooking ships small changes often, in the shoulder seasons wherever possible, because nobody wants a new booking screen on the Fourth of July weekend. Every change that touches money or the manifest is tested against real trip data supplied by operators who agreed to it. Nothing goes live on a Friday in season.

Editorially, this website follows three rules. Numbers are measured, not estimated: the fleet counts, the deposit totals and the median outcomes come from aggregate product data for the 2025 season, and they are restated when the data moves. Testimonials are published with the operator's full name, role, business and home port, with their written permission, and they are removed the day an operator asks. Product descriptions describe what the software does today, not what is on the roadmap, so a feature named on this page is a feature you can use this afternoon.

Documentation, pricing and legal pages are reviewed on a fixed schedule and after any change to the subscription terms. If you find a statement on this site that does not match what the product does, write to me and I will correct the page or correct the product.

Published articles

The nine pieces below make up Charter Log, the TransomBooking magazine, and they answer the licensing, permit, insurance and cost questions that captains raise most often when we talk about their season.

Contact the author

Email is the fastest way to reach me: jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. Tell me the boat, the port and what your season looks like, and you will get a real answer rather than a brochure. If you would rather see it working first, use the request form on the home page and I will set up a sample week on your own trip types before we talk.

You can also follow along on X, connect on LinkedIn, read more of my work at jimenezjulien.com, or find the harbor photography on Instagram and Facebook.

Publisher. TransomBooking is published by MLJ, SASU. The full company details, registration numbers and hosting information are set out on the legal notice page, and the handling of anything you send through the contact form is described in the privacy policy.