Home › Guides › How to keep a fishing log
How to keep a fishing log
A log is only useful if you keep it. Record a few things every trip, always the same way, and the patterns come later.
The essentials
- Start and end time (so you can compute catch per hour).
- Place, to the spot level if you can.
- Each catch with a time and the species.
- Whether you were fishing the whole time. Hours matter more than trips.
Useful extras
- Air temperature and wind: the one study of solunar tables found temperature was the variable that related to catch rates in its dataset.
- Barometric pressure and its trend (rising, steady, falling).
- Water temperature and clarity, if you can note them.
- Bait or lure and depth.
Skip these at first
Long narratives, ratings of the day and every minor detail. If it slows you down, you will stop logging. Add detail at home.
Log empty trips too
A trip with no catches is data. Without them every result looks better than it was. Always finish the trip so the hours count.
Make it fast
Use one tap per catch with a remembered species, and add length and weight when convenient. See the fishing log app.
After 30 trips
Look at catch rate by time of day, species and conditions. Test the moon with the Moon Test, remembering that dawn and dusk are confounders.