Fishermen's Buddy — Fishing Intelligence App
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Email fishermensbuddy@dubayaapps.comTide phase shows "No tide data." This usually means neither NOAA nor WorldTides could be reached for your location — typically a signal issue. It updates automatically once connectivity is restored.
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How Fishermen's Buddy fits together
What the app does and the five tabs
Fishermen's Buddy is your personal fishing log and forecast. You log the fish you catch; the app quietly records the conditions behind every catch — tide, weather, moon, pressure, water temperature, and location — and uses your own history to tell you when and where the bite is likely to be on.
The more you log, the smarter it gets. Early on it leans on fish biology; over time it leans on you.
The form, auto-captured conditions, tide & offline
Open the Log tab, pick the species, and tap Save Catch. That's the only required step — everything else is optional or automatic.
You never type in the weather. When you log a catch, the app pulls the live tide, water temperature, wind, pressure (and whether it's rising or falling), cloud cover, and moon phase for your exact spot and time. That's the data your forecasts and Analytics are built from.
Tide phase is pulled automatically for your location. The app uses the nearest NOAA station when one is within range — NOAA covers US waters and a number of international ports; for anywhere else it falls back to a global tidal model (WorldTides). The source is shown in teal on the Log screen, and in the header of the tide chart pop-out on Home. If neither source is reachable (typically a signal issue), the tide phase row shows "No tide data" — it will update automatically once connectivity is restored. On remote flats and back-country, the real tide can run earlier or later than the reported station. If it's off, tap the tide phase and pick what the water is actually doing where you're standing. It defaults to your last pick, so correcting a new spot is one tap — and it keeps your records and patterns accurate.
The App keeps its own copy of everything you've logged on your phone, so it works with no service — which, out on the water, is most of the time. You can browse your catches, trips, personal records and analytics, look up any fish's seasons and preferred conditions, and see your catch pins on the map, all with no bars showing.
Logging still works too. Your catch saves right away with no service and appears immediately alongside the rest — you can open it, edit it, add a photo, or delete it before you're ever back in range. It sends itself to your account automatically once you have signal, and we backfill the weather, tide and moon for that exact spot and time, so you never lose a catch or have to enter conditions by hand.
What genuinely needs a connection. Today's live readings — the current weather and tide — are measured elsewhere and fetched, so they can't be on the phone in advance. Home keeps showing the last forecast it loaded and tells you plainly that the readings may be out of date rather than hiding it. Changing a fish's seasons or prediction settings also needs a connection, and the App says so before you start rather than after. And the map picture behind your pins is downloaded from Google as you pan — anywhere you've looked at recently still draws, anywhere you haven't will be blank. Panning over the water you're heading to before you leave the dock is worth doing.
If you try to log a fish in a spot we didn't think it lives, we'll ask before saving. Tap "Add this area" and we save the catch and start forecasting that fish here, scored like any other. Tap "Exit" and nothing is saved — perfect if you picked the wrong species by accident, so you can choose again. Your catches are the final word on where a fish lives: catch one somewhere we didn't expect and we'll always offer to add it.
Turn any catch into a card you can post or send — the fish, its length and weight, the date, and the bait, with your own photo on it if you took one. Tap SHARE on the "Catch saved!" banner right after you log it, or the share icon on any catch's own screen at any time.
The card names only the town, never your coordinates. A post lives forever and gets forwarded; your spots are your own.
The Home screen, scores and the WHY breakdown
The Home screen answers one question: how good is the fishing, and when's the best time to go?
The big number is the best score your selected fish reaches today, on a 0–100 scale. Alongside it is the window of time that score lands in.
Swipe the cards at the bottom to switch between the species you target, or tap + to add a new one. The add list has a search bar — find a fish by name or category instead of scrolling. Each fish is scored on its own preferences, so the best window for snook can be very different from the best window for trout.
Biology to start, your catches over time
Every score is a weighted blend of how well the current conditions match what a fish likes — water temperature, tide phase, time of day, moon, wind, pressure and its trend, and cloud cover.
Conditions aren't the whole story — the fish has to actually be around. When you tap WHY, the Season note at the top tells you in plain language if it's a slow month, shoulder season, or peak — and whether season is capping the score even when tide and weather look perfect. If a species is out of its range entirely — you're outside the areas it lives — the score is 0, because conditions don't matter when the fish isn't there. Travelling away from home? Fish from back home may read 0 until you return. And if we've got a fish's range wrong, logging a catch there lets you set us straight (see Logging a Catch).
Before you've logged anything, each species starts from sensible defaults drawn from fish biology and regional seasonality. That's why you get useful forecasts on day one.
Every catch you log nudges that fish's preferences toward the conditions you actually catch it in. The blend is gradual on purpose — a few catches only tilt it slightly, so one lucky outing doesn't hijack your forecast. As your history grows, your real data takes over from the biology estimate.
Some fish can only be effectively caught in daylight — sight fisheries like bonefish, permit, and tarpon rely on seeing their prey in clear, lit water and aren't really fishable after dark. For these, the hourly bars and Best Window on Home are limited to daylight hours only. If a fish shows no night hours, that's why. You can override the setting in More → Species → Edit Parameters if you catch that species at night in your area.
If you think you know a fish better than the defaults, you can edit its preferences directly — see Species & Groupings. Two things drive each score: how much each factor matters (its weighting) and the ideal conditions for that fish.
Reading your fingerprints and the learning meter
The Analytics tab shows the conditions you've actually caught each fish in — your personal patterns, built only from the catches you've logged. Pick a fish at the top to see its patterns.
Near the bottom is the PERSONALIZATION bar. It shows one thing: overall, how much your own catches outweigh our biology starting estimate for this fish. It climbs every time you log a catch. But — and this matters — a high personalization bar does not automatically mean every chart is trustworthy. Those are two separate questions, and we treat them separately.
It comes down to how many possibilities a condition has. Water temperature has a single sweet spot, so a few dozen catches pin it down well. Tide and moon are different — each has eight separate phases, so your catches get spread thin across all of them. Ten catches split across eight tide phases is barely one per phase: nowhere near enough to trust a "best tide" yet, even though those same ten catches are plenty to trust a temperature range.
So we judge each condition on its own merits, not on your total catch count. As a rough guide: simple conditions like water temp, wind, and pressure become reliable around 25–30 catches; time of day around 50; tide and moon need closer to 90, because they have the most phases to fill in.
Open any chart and you'll see a small colored badge on its summary, telling you how far that one condition has come:
We're deliberately careful with strong claims. The app won't crown a "top tide" or "best moon phase" until one phase clearly stands out from the rest — so the headline won't flip every time you log a single new catch. And every read shows the count behind it ("4 of 11 catches"), so you can always see how much it's built on rather than just a percentage.
Tap any chart to open a detailed view. Each factor gets a visualization built around how that condition actually works:
Pins, species & date filters, satellite
The Map tab plots every catch you've logged, with a pin for each one.
Each species is given its own color, chosen to be as different as possible from the ones already on your map — so the fish you catch most are the easiest to tell apart. A color sticks to a species permanently. Adding a new fish or removing an old one never re-colors the ones you've already learned.
Want to change one? Tap the colored-dots button on the right of the map, under the satellite button, then tap a species and pick its color. A color another fish is already using is dimmed — you can still choose it, since two fish you never catch on the same trip can share one, but you'll know. "Reset to automatic colors" starts the whole set over and is the only way back to the automatic spread once you've made your own picks.
Your colors are saved to your account, so a new phone shows you the same map you already know how to read.
Your fishing diary, backfilling, and merging
A trip groups together all the catches from one outing — it's your fishing diary.
Tap the pencil icon on any trip to set its start time, end time, name, and location. Tap a date or time field to pick it — no typing.
By default a trip runs from your first catch to your last catch. Setting a start or end only ever WIDENS that window — if you try to set a start after your first catch or an end before your last, you'll see an error naming the catch that's in the way. That's what lets you record an overnight session (say 9 PM to 3 AM across two days) or any outing where you were on the water longer than the fish were biting.
Your times stick. Log a catch later than the end you set and the trip stretches to include it; a catch before the end won't pull it back. Delete that later catch and the trip returns to the end you set. Tap "Mark still open" to clear the end and leave the trip in progress.
An active (in-progress) trip shows the time of your latest catch as a running end in the header, so you can see the session's span growing even before you close it. Trips that cross midnight show a date range — e.g. Jun 4–5 — so you always know which days the outing spans.
Open that trip from More → Trips and tap ADD. The catch is added directly to the trip, and the conditions are pulled from the trip's own records — not today's live data. If you need to fine-tune the exact time, open the catch and tap the pencil icon. If the time you enter falls outside the original trip window, the trip automatically expands to include it.
Open any catch and tap the pencil icon to edit it. If you change the date to a different day — say you logged a fish as today's when it was actually yesterday's — the app looks at how far apart that date is from the rest of the catches in the same trip.
When the app asks, you have three choices:
To backfill a whole outing you forgot to log:
Tracking fish, custom species, fine-tuning
Your species list (More → Species) is the set of fish you target. These show up on the Home carousel and in Analytics.
Tap the ••• beside a fish you added to Archive it or Delete it. Archive hides it from your list but keeps every catch — it returns automatically when you log that species again, and until then it sits in an "Archived" section at the bottom of the list where you can restore it. Delete permanently removes it and all its catches. Built-in species can't be removed, so they have no ••• control.
Groups are families of fish that behave alike — Flats, Offshore Pelagic, Freshwater Predators, and so on. A new custom species borrows its starting behavior from its group. Edit a group's defaults (More → Species Groupings) and those become the starting point for any custom species you add to it. Standard species keep their own tuned settings.
Drag a slider to move a value quickly — the number beside it always shows exactly where you've landed, so you can still set something precisely. Open a species to edit its parameters: how much each factor matters (weighting), its preferred water temp, wind, and pressure, the tide / time / moon phases it bites best in, whether it needs clear skies ("Best sky" — mainly for sight-fishing flats fish), and whether it's day-only (night hours are hidden on Home — typical for sight fisheries like bonefish, permit, and tarpon; override it here if the fish bites at night in your area). You can reset to the defaults anytime.
The same screen shows how we rate a fish 0–5 for every month, broken out by area — so you can check our seasonality against what you actually see on the water. Tap an area to open it, tap "Adjust" to grade each month yourself, or "Add an area" if you catch it somewhere we didn't list. It's read-only until you tap Adjust, so you can't change anything by accident. Reset a single area — or the whole fish — back to our defaults whenever you like.
Biggest fish, best days, streaks, PR confetti
Personal Records (More → Personal Records) collects your fishing milestones, all pulled automatically from the catches you've logged.
These update every time you log a catch — there's nothing to enter separately.
For a clean leaderboard of every species you've landed — ranked by how many you've caught, each with its longest and heaviest — open More → Species Caught. (That's different from More → Species, which is the full list of fish you can track, caught or not.)
Heads-up when a great day is coming
Good-day alerts give you a heads-up when the forecast first reveals an upcoming day that one of your tracked fish is expected to bite well.
Each upcoming day is judged on its own and pinged the first time it crosses your threshold — the alert flags new good days as they appear, it doesn't always point to your single highest-scoring day. So if a day you can see in the 7-day forecast scored well but you never got an alert for it, it most likely sent that alert on an earlier day, before it scrolled closer. A day is only ever alerted once, so it also won't ping again if its score climbs higher later.
Units, theme, notifications, your account
Open Settings from the gear icon on the Home screen (top right).
How your catches are saved, what stays on the phone, and getting a new one
Your catches don't live only on your phone. The moment you save one, it's sent to your private, secure account in the cloud — the same account you sign in with. That happens automatically, every time, with no backup step for you to remember.
Get a new phone, install Fishermen's Buddy, and sign in with the same email and password. Every catch, trip, species, and personal record you've logged reappears right away — none of it was ever only on the old phone.
Tide phases, pressure trend, moon, and more
The app splits the tide into eight phases, from slack water through the flood and ebb:
On the Tide Phase chart in Analytics, the eight phases are laid out as a sine wave. The 7 spaces between the grey bars each represent one phase, reading left to right: E.Flood, M.Flood, L.Flood, High Slack (center, at the wave peak), E.Ebb, M.Ebb, and L.Ebb. A grey count above the arc shows how many catches fell in each space. Low Slack (dead low) is the starting and ending point at both ends of the wave.
Barometric pressure is measured in inches of mercury (inHg) — typical sea-level readings run from about 29.5 (stormy) to 30.5 (clear and calm). Many fish feed hard on a falling barometer ahead of a front, then slow once pressure settles high, so the trend (Rising / Steady / Falling) often matters as much as the number itself. The Analytics Pressure Trend chart shows both: a rainbow histogram of the raw pressure bands your catches cluster in, alongside a separate trend breakdown.
How lit the moon is, from new (dark) to full. It shifts feeding times and — around new and full moons — drives bigger tide swings.
The water temperature at your spot, and one of the strongest drivers of where fish hold and how actively they feed. It comes from a real reading wherever one exists: sea-surface temperature offshore and along the coasts, a USGS gauge on US rivers and lakes, or a NOAA gauge on the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence and the big tidal rivers — several of which read water on both sides of the Canadian border.
If the nearest gauge is too far away to mean anything for your water, we show nothing rather than a number from somewhere else. A reading from a brook sixty miles inland is not your river's temperature, and a wrong number is worse than an honest blank. Smaller inland lakes and rivers outside the US often have no gauge near enough to use.
Cloud cover from live weather. On the Best Window card it's shown as a sky description plus sunshine percent (e.g. partly cloudy · 60% sunshine) — 60% sunshine means 40% cloud cover. For sight-fishing species, clear skies can matter more; see Best sky in Edit Parameters.