The Toolbox · Bite Window
Should you go fishing today, and when? This reads the forecast for your spot the way anglers always have: the barometer, the light, the wind and the moon. You get one plain answer, the two best windows and the why.
Bite Window reads the live forecast, and that needs JavaScript.
The short version anglers use: go in the hour around sunrise or sunset, when the barometer is falling and a light wind puts a chop on the water.
Live flow is on the Salmon River page for Pulaski, and on the Rivers page for every other gauge.
How it reads the water
Every hour from first light to last light gets points from the rules below. A window is the best two hours in a row, and the day’s call comes from its best window: 6.5 points or more is good, 4.5 fair, 2.5 slow, anything less tough. These are rules of thumb anglers have argued about forever, not science and not a promise. Fish don’t read forecasts.
- Light. The hour around sunrise or sunset: +3. Within two hours of either: +1.5. Midday under heavy cloud (70% or more): +1. Midday bright sun (25% cloud or less): −1.
- Barometer. The change over the last six hours. Falling 0.07 to 0.15 inHg: +2. Dropping faster than that: +1.5 (the bite often turns on ahead of a front, and so does the weather). Steady: +0.5. Rising: −0.5. Climbing fast after a front: −1.5.
- Wind. A light chop, 4 to 14 mph: +1.5. Flat calm: +1.5, same as a chop (a glassy dawn is topwater time). Breezy, 15 to 19 mph: −0.5. Windy, 20 to 24 mph: −1.5. 25 mph or more, or gusts of 35: −3.
- Moon. Within an hour of the moon overhead or underfoot: +1. Within half an hour of moonrise or moonset: +0.5. Near a new or full moon: +0.5 more. That’s solunar theory from the 1920s, and the evidence for it is thin, so it counts least.
- Weather. Rain chance of 70% or more: −0.5. Air at 88°F or hotter outside low light: −1. Freezing: −1. A thunderstorm in the forecast takes that hour out entirely. Lightning and a graphite rod don’t mix.
Where the numbers come from: weather from Open-Meteo (free, CC BY 4.0), the nearest river gauge from the USGS through this site’s own Rivers lookup, and the moon worked out right on this page with SunCalc’s formulas, checked against the U.S. Naval Observatory. Your spot stays in your browser. Check your state’s regulations before you go, since some water closes at night, like the Salmon River.
Throw five on it