About ReelConditions

A free fishing conditions dashboard built around one question: is it worth going today?

About this site

What this is

ReelConditions is a single-page utility that takes a US town or zip code and shows you everything that determines whether the fish will be feeding — tides, wind, barometric pressure and its trend, water temperature, sea state, moon phase, solunar periods and sunrise and sunset — then combines them into an hourly fishability score for the next seven days, weighted for the species you actually target.

It exists because the information was already public and free, and it was scattered across four websites and two apps. Checking the barometer on one, the tide on another, and the moon on a third, then holding all of it in your head, is a chore. This puts it on one screen.

Where the data comes from

• Weather, wind, pressure, cloud cover, sunrise and sunset — Open-Meteo, which aggregates national weather service models including NOAA's GFS and HRRR.
• Tide predictions — the NOAA Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, covering roughly 3,500 US stations.
• Sea surface temperature and wave height — the Open-Meteo marine model.
• Moon phase, moonrise, moonset, transit and solunar periods — computed astronomically in your browser for your exact coordinates. Nothing is looked up.

Everything is fetched directly by your browser when you load the page. There is no server in between, no account, and nothing to sign up for.

Who built it

ReelConditions was built by an angler who got tired of doing this arithmetic in his head at 4 a.m. — mostly for striped bass on the south shore of Long Island, with occasional embarrassing attempts at bonefish on saltwater flats.

Why it is free

The underlying data is public and the site has no running costs beyond a domain. Advertising covers that. If the ads ever get in the way of the tool working, the ads are the thing that should change.

Corrections

If a tide station is matching wrong for your area, a species weighting seems clearly off, or something is simply broken, please say so. Specific reports — location, species, what you expected, what you got — are the useful kind.