User Guide

Getting Started

FishON! Pro is a private fishing journal that aggregates real-time environmental data from five federal sources. Everything you enter is stored on your device and visible only to you.

1. Download FishON! Pro from the App Store. No account is required. Android coming soon.
2. Grant location access when prompted (optional but recommended — helps center the map and find nearby weather stations).
3. Create your first River — this is the top level of your hierarchy (e.g., “Deschutes River”).
4. Add a Section under that river — a distinct stretch of water you fish (e.g., “Lower Deschutes - Maupin”). Set its boundaries and FishON! Pro discovers nearby gauges, weather, and tide stations to link. The section is what gets scored and what your trip reports attach to.
5. Set your ideal conditions for the section — flow range (by season), water temp range, and preferred flow trend. This activates the Conditions Score.
6. (Optional) Drop Location pins within a section to mark exact spots — a favorite run, hole, or launch. You don't need them to get conditions or scores.

Organizing Your Water

FishON! Pro organizes your water the way anglers actually think about it — Rivers and Sections, with optional Location pins. The section is the unit everything revolves around:

River

The top-level container. Can represent a river, lake, bay, estuary, or any body of water. You create and name these yourself — there's no pre-built list. Most anglers have 3–8 rivers.

Section

A distinct stretch within a river — and the unit FishON! Pro is built around. You link data sources, set ideal conditions, and read the Conditions Score at the section, and your trip reports attach to it. Each section can also carry its own regulations, access notes, permit info, and fishing report links. Set a section's boundaries and FishON! Pro discovers the data sources near it:

• USGS stream gauges — flow (CFS), gage height, water temperature
• NWS weather stations — air temp, wind, humidity, barometric pressure
• NOAA tide stations — tide height, trend, next high/low
• NWRFC river gauges — flow, water temp, historical percentiles (PNW)
• NDBC buoys — wave height, water temp, wind

Select the sources relevant to your water, and live data starts flowing immediately.

Location Optional

GPS pins for exact spots within a section — a favorite run, hole, or launch. Locations are for your own reference; because data sources, ideal conditions, and scoring all live at the section, you never need a location to get conditions or a Conditions Score.

Water Types

Live Conditions

Each location card displays real-time conditions from all linked data sources. Data updates automatically — pull to refresh for the latest readings.

What Each Metric Means

5-Day Flow Chart

On the Angler and Guide tiers, each section with a linked USGS gauge shows a 5-day flow history chart. This helps you see trends — is the river rising from snowmelt? Dropping after a rain event? The chart gives context that a single number can't. (Scout still sees the current flow value, gage height, and water temp.)

Catch Logging

When you log a catch, FishON! Pro automatically captures a complete conditions snapshot — fetching current data from every linked source at that exact moment. This snapshot is permanently attached to your catch record.

What Gets Captured

• Species, method (fly/spin/bait), lure or fly pattern, notes
• Up to 5 photos per catch
• River data: flow, gage height, water temp, flow trend
• Weather: air temp, wind, humidity, barometric pressure, cloud cover
• Tide data: height, trend, next high/low (if applicable)
• Timestamp and location

Offline Logging

No cell service? No problem. FishON! Pro saves your catch immediately with a “needs backfill” flag. When your phone reconnects, conditions data is automatically fetched and attached. Weather data is available up to 7 days back.

Backdated Catches

You can set a custom date and time when logging. FishON! Pro will attempt to fetch historical conditions for that timestamp.

Trip Reports

Longer-form session summaries covering a full outing — fish count, the conditions you found, duration, quality rating, and notes. Every trip is stamped with the live data at that spot and sharpens your Conditions Scores over time.

Activity Log

Your complete fishing record in one searchable timeline. Every trip report and catch across all locations.

View Modes

• List — chronological feed of all activity
• Calendar — see which days you fished at a glance
• Map — all activity plotted geographically

Filtering

Filter by activity type, species, location, date range, or search by keyword across all entries.

Rankings & Scoring

The Conditions Score rates every location on a 0–100 scale and ranks them Prime, Good, Fair, or Poor. Each score comes with a plain-English reason explaining why. The score is rolling and seasonal — a spot shows a score when you've logged a trip around this time of year (within ~2 weeks of today's date), and it returns each season.

How Scores Are Calculated

The score blends up to four layers of intelligence. The app automatically adjusts how much each layer contributes based on what data is available.

• Weather — Wind, barometric pressure trend, air temperature, and forecast outlook. Always active — the baseline when no other data is available.
• Data Sources — Flow vs. your ideal range, water temperature, flow trend, tide stage, and buoy conditions. Active once you've linked gauges, tide stations, or buoys and set your preferences.
• Catch History — Compares current conditions to conditions when you've actually caught fish at that spot. Its influence grows as you log more trips.
• Field Intel — Recent trip reports factor in access conditions, crowd levels, water clarity, and your own quality ratings.

Catch history ramps in as you log: 0–2 trips, preferences + weather drive the score; 3–4, catch history begins contributing; 5–9, it carries significant weight; 10+, full catch confidence.

Score Ranges

Sections without enough signal show no score yet, rather than a number.

Golden Conditions

As you log catches, FishON! Pro correlates your success with the environmental conditions captured in each snapshot. Over time, it discovers your personal golden conditions — the exact combination of flow, water temp, weather, and barometric pressure that puts fish on your line at each of your sections.

This isn't a generic algorithm. It's built from your catches, at your spots, under your conditions. The more you fish and log, the smarter it gets.

How It Works

1. Log catches consistently — the conditions snapshot is captured automatically every time.
2. Once you've logged a trip around this time of year, the catch correlation engine starts contributing — and its influence grows with each trip you log.
3. FishON! Pro compares current conditions against the conditions present during your successful catches.
4. Sections where current conditions closely match your historical catch conditions score higher in the daily rankings.

Per-Species Profiles Coming Soon

Per-species golden conditions are on the way: FishON! Pro will learn separate condition profiles for each species you target at a spot — so steelhead and trout at the same run get their own patterns. Today, golden conditions are learned per section.

Offline Maps

FishON! Pro lets you download USGS National Map satellite imagery for offline use. Essential for backcountry water with no cell service.

How to Download

• Navigate to a section and tap the offline maps option
• Choose the area to download — by section bounds or custom region
• Tiles are downloaded at zoom levels 10–16 for detailed coverage
• No size cap — limited only by your device storage

Managing Storage

View storage usage per section in Settings → Storage. You can delete individual section tiles or clear all cached tiles to free space. Tiles are stored locally in the app's Documents directory.

Data Management

iCloud Sync

Available with Angler and Guide tiers. Syncs your data across your Apple devices via your personal iCloud account. We never have access to your synced data.

Export

Available with Angler and Guide tiers. Export your entire fishing journal — locations, catches, observations, trip reports, and preferences — as a single JSON backup file for full data archival or device migration.

Privacy & Telemetry

FishON! Pro is a private fishing journal. Everything you enter is visible only to you. There is no social feed, no leaderboards, and no data sharing.

For full details, see the Privacy Policy.