How this works

A spot is a place, and it stays put. Fishing it is an event that repeats. That split is the whole point: the same swim in June and in January is one pin with two very different records against it.

Two things on a spot change what the planner does with it. The water type decides whether it gets tides, a river gauge, or neither. The method decides which set of rules scores it. Methods are grouped by how the bait gets there, because that is the choice you make when you pack the car: lure (predator, sea lure), and bait (carp, barbel, sea bait). The species underneath is what actually gets scored — carp and barbel are both bait and want nearly opposite conditions, so they cannot share a profile.

Leaving the methods blank is not the same as choosing none. Blank means “not narrowed down”, and the water type answers for you: a stillwater is assumed to be carp and predator water, a sea mark to be lure and bait. Tick something and your choice wins.

A sea mark can also carry which way it faces. With it, the planner can tell a wind blowing into the mark from one blowing off it. For lure fishing, a wind into the mark at 8–18 mph counts for the window, because it brings wash and colour. A wind off it above 8 mph counts against, because it flattens and clears the water. The morning after an onshore blow counts too: the water is still coloured and the mark is fishable again. Under 6 mph none of this applies, and the tide carries the decision.

A venue groups the sides of one place, such as the west side, the Bill and the east side of Portland. When two or more of them share a window, the planner puts a Which side? comparison above their cards and tags the pick. If the top two are within 0.1 of each other, it says it is too close to call and you should go and look.

The planner looks at the next seven days, builds the windows worth fishing at each spot, and scores them. It is a ranking aid. It says where the odds lean, and it is often wrong about any single day.

There is no maximum. A window starts at 1.00 — an ordinary day — and every condition that helps or hurts moves it from there. So the number is a comparison between days, not a mark out of anything.

• 1.50 +Strong
• 1.10 +Promising
• 0.80 +Ordinary
• under 0.80Against you

Every modifier that fired is listed on the card under Why this score, in plain words. That is deliberate: you know your waters better than a formula does, and a score you cannot argue with is no use.

The weights behind these scores are a starting point taken from general angling practice, not something learned from your water yet. Once the diary has a season in it they can be checked against what you actually caught.

Some days are removed rather than scored low, and the planner lists them under Not shown with the reason. A silent gap would be indistinguishable from a bug.

Pike welfare. Days at or above 21°C are excluded when pike are a target, as is a run of three such days even if today is cooler. Warm water holds less oxygen, and a pike played in it often swims off looking fine and dies hours later. This is an exclusion rather than a penalty on purpose: no combination of good tide and falling glass should ever add up to going anyway.

Close season. Coarse fishing on rivers is shut from 15 March to 15 June. Stillwaters and canals are not affected. This is why a barbel spot shows nothing at all for those months — it is not that the fishing is poor, it is that the river is legally shut.

A seven-day planner structurally cannot answer “is February any good for bass”. The strip at the bottom of the planner does: twelve months, scored with the same rules, so it can never contradict the week above it.

Months are rated against each other for that method rather than on an absolute scale — the question is how August compares with February for the way you fish, not whether either clears some bar. Where a method has no real season the strip says so instead of inventing one.

It uses long-term averages, not a forecast. A mild February will fish better than the strip suggests, and that is what the daily planner is for.

This matters more than anything else on the page, so it is spelt out rather than buried.

Tides are predicted — a category of their own, neither measured nor guessed. Admiralty publishes the astronomy seven days out and the astronomy is exact, but it describes the moon and the sun rather than the water: a hard blow up the Bristol Channel pushes the real tide off the published curve, and nothing here corrects for that.

They are also predicted for a station, not for your mark. A spot only gets tides if a station is within 25 km, and the station and its distance are always shown, because a mark twenty minutes up the estuary does not turn at the same minute the port does. That matters most for the leave-by cut-off, which is worked from the station’s predicted high water with no local correction — take the margin. Heights are metres above chart datum. Some smaller ports publish times without heights; those show as a dash rather than a made-up number, and anything Admiralty calls approximate carries a tilde.

Weather and sea state are forecast — wind, cloud, pressure, wave height and sea temperature. As reliable as any forecast, which is to say less so further out. Sunrise and sunset come from the same lookup, so when it fails a window reads “light unknown” and the light stops counting toward the score. The tide times on that day are unaffected — they never depended on it.

Onshore and offshore are a forecast wind read against a bearing you set. The wind is forecast hour by hour, window by window. A pair of coordinates cannot tell the app which way a shore faces, so you set that once on the spot, standing on the mark facing the sea. Every onshore or offshore call is only as good as that bearing. Set it wrong and the planner will confidently call an offshore wind onshore. Leave it blank and nothing about it is scored or shown.

River level is a real reading from the nearest Environment Agency gauge within 15 km — but it is today’s reading applied across the whole week, because levels are not forecast. The gauge name and distance are always shown, because only you can judge whether it is on the same water you are fishing.

Inland water temperature is the one figure the app guesses. No free service publishes UK stillwater temperature, so it uses a 7-day trailing average of air temperature as a stand-in — a shallow pond and a deep gravel pit read identically here and fish nothing alike. Estimated from air temperature, not measured. Treat it as a direction, not a reading.

Swell. Cards flag a big sea from 1.5 m and a dangerous one from 2.5 m, quoting the height. The warning sits outside the scoring so that a good tide and a falling glass can never outvote it. It is based on the day’s peak, not the reading at this minute, because you are deciding whether to set off.

Strong onshore. On a mark with a bearing, cards flag a wind into it above 20 mph, or gusting above 28 mph: choose high platforms and know your way off. Like the swell warning, it sits outside the scoring. The onshore bonus stands down while the warning shows, so the score never argues with it.

Tide cut-offs. A spot can carry a “leave by” time, set as minutes before high water. Worth filling in for any mark that cuts off — the app will show the time, but it cannot know the ground.

Bass. Rules are shown on every sea card: currently 3 fish per angler per day outside February and March, which are catch-and-release, with a 42 cm minimum size. These were last checked on 25 August 2026 and are set annually, so verify against gov.uk before keeping a fish. Mackerel are flagged as out of season below a 13°C mean sea temperature.

Tide times here are a planning aid and not for navigation. A rod licence is your responsibility; the app will remind you of the expiry date you give it and nothing more.

Log a session from the spot on the map. Species, method, weights, and whatever you want to remember.

Log the blanks. They are real data and the app treats them as such — a month fished without a catch shows as a grey stub on the chart, which is a different statement from never having fished it. Over a season the blanks are what make the good days mean anything.

Every session quietly records the conditions on the day it was caught: pressure and trend, wind, temperature, moon, tide state, river level and, on a mark with a bearing, whether the wind was onshore or offshore. You never fill that in, and it is what will eventually let the app tell you which conditions actually produce on your waters.

The import page takes a Google Takeout export of your saved places. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.

Dropped pins carry coordinates and come across exactly. Named places do not — Google exports them with an internal id and no position, and there is no free way to turn one into the other. Rather than look the name up and drop a pin in a town centre that would look exactly as confident as a real swim, those are listed for you to place yourself.

A pin landing within 25 m of one you already have is flagged and left unticked, so running the same file twice cannot double up your map. That distance is deliberately tight: real swims sit tens of metres apart on the same bank.