About CatchClock
CatchClock is a solunar time engine with a website attached. It publishes major and minor bite windows, sun and moon times, and the waters and species that matter in a given city — all of it computed when the site is built, from static inputs, so that nothing on the page depends on a service staying up while you are standing at a boat ramp with one bar of signal.
What this site does
Three things, and they are separate on purpose. The fishing forecast by city grid answers when to go for a specific place. Best fishing times and the guides around it answer why those windows exist at all. The guides collected under how to catch fish answer what to do once you are standing there with a rod. The mechanism is explained on the explanatory pages and not repeated city by city, which is why a city page gives you one sentence about the Moon and a link rather than five paragraphs you have read before.
Every published time comes from astronomy-engine 2.1.19 and the city's own coordinates, and the method is written out in full on how we calculate bite times — the window formula, the model behind it, the references we compare against, and the measurement that shows why we solve for the Moon's hour angle instead of its peak altitude. Before publication the engine is run across the whole grid, and that run is where the awkward days turn up — the ones a template with two fixed rows would quietly get wrong.
14,235
The city grid goes out in batches, and the first fifteen cities were not picked by population. They cover seven of the eight time zones in the grid, one zone that never shifts for daylight saving, and latitudes from 25.8° N to 61.2° N — the range where the calculation's edge cases actually show up. A grid built from the largest metros would have been easier and would have tested nothing.
What we do not publish
Four things are left out on purpose, and each omission costs us traffic we could otherwise have had.
Regulations, seasons and limits
We do not restate a single season date, size limit or bag limit. They change, they differ by water body inside one state, and a page that repeats them is wrong the moment an agency updates a rule. Every city page links its state agency instead, and that link is the answer.
Other people's spots
Coordinates of somebody's marked waypoint are not ours to publish. Where we write about places, they are publicly listed access points, named the way the managing agency names them.
Safety advice
We are not a safety authority, and a bite window is not an opinion about whether it is safe to launch. Wind, ice, current and the boat you are in are questions for the National Weather Service and for your own judgement.
Live weather
A live forecast block would have to be fetched by your browser, which means it would not be in the page a search engine reads — and it would be the one thing on a static site that can fail in front of you. We would rather say plainly that pressure and fronts are outside the model.
Who we are not affiliated with
CatchClock is independent of every agency whose public data it uses. We are not affiliated with NOAA, with the U.S. Naval Observatory, or with any state fish and wildlife agency; where their data appears, the source and the station or office is named next to it. In our comparison of fishing apps the app names belong to their owners, no one pays for placement, and our own app is listed on the same criteria as the rest, including the cases where another app is the better answer. A comparison in which one product wins every row is a comparison nobody should believe, ours included.
Who writes this
Pages here are published by CatchClock Editorial, which is an organization rather than a person. We could have invented an angler with thirty years on the water and put a portrait next to the byline; instead the byline names the group that owns the code and the checks, and everything that can be verified about our work is the method rather than the biography. The site asks nothing of you in return: no accounts, no forms, no cookies, as described on privacy and data.