Fishing may sometimes be about relaxing by the river bank with your line in the water, and waiting to see what bites. However, there will be other times where you don’t want to sit there like a chump, in the vague hope a prize trout or bass gets hooked. For those days, you will want the Fishbrain app, with its new BiteTime feature, which helps keen anglers plan ahead and know where and when is the best time to catch a certain fish.
How? By using Fishbrain’s extensive library of data and some cutting-edge machine learning. If you’re not familiar with Fishbrain, at its heart it is Instagram for those who love to fish. But underneath the photo-sharing aspect, Fishbrain collects and analyzes data from catches, locations, and conditions. This was used for a basic version of BiteTime in the app called Fishing Forecast, introduced in 2014, but BiteTime brings it right up to date.
Fishbrain has data from an astonishing 5.4 million catches, and more than 30 different weather and climate attributes. BiteTime takes all this data to come up with the best time to catch a particular fish species, in any body of water, anywhere in the world. Fishbrain gives the example that if you were planning a fishing trip to Point Harbor in San Francisco, BiteTime would tell you that if you want a largemouth bass on your hook, you best be there at 4 a.m. You’d also see if the weather conditions and climate trends from previous catches matched the forecast — including everything from moon phase to air pressure — so you could avoid a wasted journey.
BiteTime presents all this in bar graphs, and applies its data to 50 different species of fish. Previously, fishermen relied on forecasts that came other fishermen, fishing boat captains, and state departments, all based on what was seen and experienced in the water. Fishbrain takes this a step further by mixing it with machine learning.
The idea, says Fishbrain CEO Johan Attby, is for the app to, “do all the complicated work so that you can focus on the fun bit: Catching fish.” He continued, “Using this unprecedented amount of data we can calculate the best time of day or night to catch a particular species of fish, using the most accurate fishing forecast ever produced, which significantly increases the chances of success. Excitingly we can now also definitively prove and disprove the numerous myths that surround fishing times for different types of fish.”
Fishbrain is available for Android and iOS, and is one of Casio’s partners on the new Pro Trek WSD-F30 smartwatch, taking advantage of the watch’s sensors and mapping features. To take advantage of the BiteTime feature, you will have to pay for the premium version of Fishbrain, which costs $75 per year.
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