The standard pre-trip routine is six tabs deep: BOM, Willy Weather, Seabreeze, a tide chart, a moon-phase calendar, a solunar table. This page is a field guide to what each source actually tells you, where each one is blind, and the two or three combinations that produce a real answer.
The standard Friday-night-before-fishing routine: BOM → Willy Weather → Seabreeze → tide chart somewhere → moon-phase calendar → solunar tables. Six tabs to answer one question. Which of those conditions actually matter, and which are noise that anglers have been told to track for decades without anyone checking the evidence?
Most fishing apps short-circuit the question and dump a generic "bite score" in front of you without explaining the inputs. That is fine if the score works. It is dangerous if it does not, because you have no way to second-guess it on the water. This page explains the inputs — what each source actually measures, what its blind spots are, and which two or three combine to give you a real prediction. By the end of it you should be able to read conditions cold, with or without an app.
Six common sources, what each one measures, why it matters, and where it falls short. Treat the blind spots as load-bearing — they are the reason no single source is enough.
Measures: Synoptic-scale pressure systems, fronts, wind direction at standard heights, rainfall radar, marine warnings.
Best for: 1–3 day outlook, spotting frontal systems, marine warnings before you launch the boat.
Blind spot: Forecast grids are coarse — kilometres wide rather than spot-specific — so a sheltered cove and an exposed headland a few kilometres apart get the same forecast even though they fish very differently. BOM is the right tool for the big picture and the wrong tool for the spot-specific call.
Measures: Repackaged BOM data plus tides, swell, barometric pressure, sun and moon times, on a per-location dashboard.
Best for: A glanceable single-screen overview when you have already chosen a spot. The tide and barometer trend graphs are useful.
Blind spot: The displayed fishing score is a generic formula applied uniformly, not tuned to your spot or your target species. Two anglers chasing different fish at the same beach see the same score even though the species cue on completely different things.
Measures: Live wind from coastal stations, offshore wind models (GFS, ACCESS), wave buoy data, web cams at popular surf and fishing spots.
Best for: Today, the last hour, and the question "do I need to bail on this session before I drive out there". The live observations beat any forecast inside the next two hours.
Blind spot: Real-time only — there is no predictive bite logic. Seabreeze will tell you it is blowing 22 knots out of the south right now; it will not tell you whether the fish will feed in that wind.
Measures: Astronomical tide heights and times, derived from harmonic constants for each port. Highly accurate days and weeks ahead because the underlying physics is just the moon and sun.
Best for: Timing windows. Knowing when the run-in starts, when slack is, when the run-out tops out.
Blind spot: Tides do not tell you bite — they tell you water movement, and the relationship to feeding is loose. Tide matters more for some species (estuary bream and flathead on the run-in) than others (a kingfish on a temperature break does not care about your tide).
Measures: Lunar phase, transit times, the John Alden Knight solunar formula combining moon and sun transits into "major" and "minor" feeding periods.
Best for: A tiebreaker between two days that otherwise look equally fishable. Some species — mulloway, snapper around full and new moons — do show real lunar patterns that anglers have logged for generations.
Blind spot: Marketed harder than the data supports. The original solunar work dates from the 1920s–1940s and was built on a narrow species set. Modern peer-reviewed work shows weak and inconsistent effects across species. Useful as a 5–10% weighting on top of everything else, not as the headline number.
Measures: Satellite-derived sea surface temperature, often combined with altimetry to show eddies and currents — Bluelink, IMOS OceanCurrent, NASA charts.
Best for: Pelagic and offshore work. Finding the East Australian Current edge, eddies that warm water moves through, the temperature breaks where bait stacks up and tuna and marlin patrol.
Blind spot: Cloud cover blanks the imagery, sometimes for days. Spatial resolution varies. SST is one or two days old by the time it reaches a public chart — fronts shift in that window.
Any single source above is incomplete. Two or three combined start to look like a real prediction. The trick is knowing which two or three for the fish you are chasing.
The bite happens. High tide pushing water onto the flats and into the snags, a barometer rising after a front, and a sea breeze that has not built past 15 knots — that is the combination. Everything else (moon, solunar, water clarity) is a small adjustment around the edges of those three.
The classic mulloway setup. New moon (or full — both run, but new moon at night gives darker bait shadows), the two-hour window each side of high tide, and water that was dirty after rain but is now clearing as the run-out cleans the system. When those three line up, go. When only one does, save the petrol.
Out wide, water temperature dominates. Find a temperature break of a degree or more on the SST chart, look for bait on the sounder when you get there, and pick a day the wind will not destroy the run home. Barometric pressure matters less here than the temperature edge — pelagics are following bait, and bait is following water.
The hidden cost of the six-tab routine is not the time itself — it is the sessions you skip because the pre-trip check is twenty-five minutes of switching tabs and squinting at graphs. Friday evening rolls around, you are tired, the kids need dinner, and somewhere between BOM and the third solunar table you decide tomorrow is probably not worth it.
The Reddit thread that prompted this page had one commenter describe their workaround: paste the BOM, Willy, Seabreeze, tide, moon and solunar data into ChatGPT and ask it to combine them. That is the level of friction we are dealing with. A pre-trip check shaped like data entry is a pre-trip check that does not happen.
Even a perfect forecast loses most of its value if the work to read it eats your Friday night. The job of any tool in this space is to compress the six tabs into one number you can read in five seconds — and then show its working when you want to second-guess it.
If you do not want to lean on any app at all, five questions will get you about 80% of the answer in roughly 90 seconds. Walk them in order:
When five out of five line up, you go. When two or fewer line up, you stay home or take the kids to the park. The middle case — three or four out of five — is the messy zone where a tool earns its keep by weighing the variables for you instead of leaving you to wing it.
This is the one product-pitch section on this page, and it is here on purpose: if everything above sounds like work, that is what Fishare exists to do.
Under the hood, Fishare takes BOM synoptic data, tide harmonics, sea surface temperature, barometric trend, moon phase, and a database of millions of real catch records, and produces one number per spot for the next seven days. The score lets you scan a week at a glance and zero in on the days and the three-hour windows worth driving for.
Honest about what it does not do. It does not know about every short-notice local closure — those live on the relevant state fisheries pages and our licence and regulations reference. It does not guarantee a fish; no model can. The score is a probability shaped by the data we have, not a promise, and a slow day under a good score still happens. We are honest about that because the alternative is the generic bite scores everyone else ships, which look certain and produce blanks just as often.
Free, no card, runs in the browser. Try the Sydney forecast or browse Sydney spots and see whether the score matches your local read.
They show small, inconsistent effects in peer-reviewed work and stronger anecdotal effects in angler logs. The original solunar work was published nearly a century ago on a narrow species set and has been extended well beyond its original evidence. Treat solunar as a tiebreaker between two otherwise equal days, not the headline input. Some species (mulloway, snapper) do show real lunar patterns; many do not.
Yes, but the mechanism is indirect. Fish do not feel pressure directly the way we do; they respond to the weather changes that pressure tracks. A rising barometer usually means improving conditions, calmer water, and active baitfish — and the predators follow. A rapidly falling barometer ahead of a front can produce a feeding burst then a shutdown. Stable-high is reliable; rapid change is the cue.
The fastest way is to write down the wind at your three favourite spots on every session for a season and note the catch. Patterns usually become obvious after a season of honest logging. As a starting point in Sydney: north-easterlies favour the ocean beaches and the back of the harbour, southerlies favour the harbour's northern shores and shut down the open beaches, westerlies are clean for the rocks but tough for kayaks.
There is no universal answer because the right tool depends on what you fish for. Willy Weather is excellent as a single-screen overview. Seabreeze wins for live, today-only checks before you commit to a session. BOM is the source of truth for marine warnings. Fishare combines those inputs and weights them against a database of real catches. Try a few and keep the one that matches your local fishing.
Light rain and the first day after heavy rain are often outstanding, particularly in estuaries where runoff flushes bait and predators move in behind it. Heavy rain during the session is uncomfortable but does not usually shut the bite off. What does shut it off is the freshwater wedge that follows several days of heavy rain — bream and flathead retreat downstream until salinity recovers.
Because the spot itself is only one variable. The same patch of weedbed produces a 5kg flathead on a rising barometer and a clearing run-out, and produces nothing on a falling barometer with onshore wind chopping up the water. The point of the combinations above is to separate the "spot is wrong" days from the "conditions are wrong" days — they look identical from the bank but they are completely different problems.
Keep reading: the tide chart explainer, our Sydney tides and swell guide, the first session in Sydney walkthrough, or jump straight to the Sydney forecast and Sydney spots.
Fishare scores the next seven days at every spot in Australia and shows the three-hour windows worth driving for. Log catches and blanks to teach the model your local patterns. Free forever for everyone who joins now.
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