A fishing bite-time forecast. It blends solunar theory (feeding windows driven by the sun and moon), live weather, and water temperature into an hourly “bite score,” tuned to the species you pick. It’s a planning aid to help you choose when to fish — not a guarantee.

Each hour starts from a light-driven base — dawn & dusk, and darkness for night feeders, scaled to your species. That base is then multiplied by weather factors: water temperature versus the species’ active band, barometric trend, wind, and cloud cover. Because the factors compound instead of averaging, a day where several line up scores high, and a day where they conflict is allowed to score genuinely low — the forecast will tell you not to bother. Solunar (the sun & moon windows) rides last as a small nudge, capped at about +12%. Tap “Why this score?” on the forecast to see the base and every factor for the current hour.

Because it’s probably a proxy, not a cause. Water pressure dwarfs weather: ten feet of water adds about a third of an atmosphere, while a dramatic storm swing is only a few percent of one — a fish feels more change moving up a couple of feet than from any front. What correlates in angler reports is that a falling trend precedes the whole incoming-weather package (wind, cloud, low light, stirred-up food). So BiteWatch weights the pressure trend, weights it most for shallow-water species, and lets the light and wind it heralds do most of the work.

In saltwater with real tides, maybe. In freshwater the lunar pull is weak, and most apparent “solunar hits” are just the window happening to land on dawn or dusk anyway — which the light factor already rewards. So BiteWatch keeps the solunar math, caps its influence at a small nudge, and flags the overlap when a lunar window does line up with a twilight edge, rather than letting the moon drive the number.

Weather from Open-Meteo, water temperature from the USGS water-data API, your county (for regulations) from the FCC area API, and New York fishing rules from NYSDEC. Sun and moon positions are computed on your device. Everything uses free, keyless sources — no login, no server.

Yes. Your catch log, saved spots, and settings live only on this device (browser storage) — they’re never uploaded, and there’s no account or tracking. Export/Import (JSON) is how you move them. If cloud sync is ever added it’ll be opt-in, and any shared data will fuzz your exact location.

Logging is one tap and builds your own dataset. After a handful of entries, BiteWatch gently nudges the score toward the conditions that actually produce for you. Logging blank trips (“No catch”) matters just as much — it’s how the app tells a hot window from one you just fish a lot.

It’s a planning aid. Solunar theory has mixed real-world evidence, and the species weights are informed guesses, not lab-validated — your log is what calibrates them. Water temp is often the nearest gauge (which can be far) or an estimate from air temp, labeled as such. The water always gets the final say.

Size limits, seasons, and creel limits are mirrored from official NYSDEC pages (New York only, for now) and shown for your county — with water-specific overrides where they exist. It’s a convenience copy that can go out of date, so always confirm at the DEC link before keeping fish.