Help & Reference
What each part of Strikepoint does
Your town and location
Type your town in the header box: every Florida coastal fishing town is in it, 122 of them from Perdido Key round the Panhandle and the Big Bend, down the Gulf to Flamingo, through the Keys and up the Atlantic to Fernandina Beach, plus the canal towns of the southeast (Kendall, Sunrise, Coral Springs, Margate, Delray Beach). A few letters of the name or the county find it (wakulla finds Panacea; ft myers and fort myers are the same). Towns on Mosquito Lagoon and the north Indian River (Oak Hill, Titusville) are marked tideless: the finder scores that water on wind, light and temperature instead of a tide that does not move there. Strikepoint scopes the spots, tide, and weather to that town. Until you pick one yourself, the app follows your device's location and snaps to the nearest town as you travel; once you pick a town, that choice sticks and is never overridden (pick again to change it). Conditions and weather are live and free (no key); tide is real NOAA data; everything still works offline on bundled data.
Dashboard
Your at-a-glance read, arranged decision-first: the briefing headline and verdict up top, then, when the town has a gator-trout read, a Trophy watch line with today's and tomorrow's gator score and best window, then one instrument row (water temp with its trend, the tide, which reads out the measured current and when the water next turns wherever a NOAA current station covers your town, wind, seas, moon, barometer, red tide) and the go/no-go run call. Below that, the answers grouped: Where to go now, Best windows, which rank the solunar periods and the morning and evening bite (the hour before sunrise through mid-morning, the last two hours of light through dusk) by how hard the water will be moving through them, for today and, on the day chips, for tomorrow and the two days after it (each day read from its own bundled feeding periods, tide turns and current, so it answers offline) (measured current where there is a station, tide-derived movement elsewhere) and include the sight-fishing light window, Tide and light (the curve, next high or low, and the sun times), Today's targets (every gamefish's bite score plus the top calls with where and what to throw, each with the stretch of today when the water runs the way that fish wants it, taken from the published current rather than the tide table; a species whose season has passed is capped and says out of season here), what the fish are eating this month (the mullet run, whitebait, glass minnows, shrimp, crabs, with where each shows up and which fish key on it), and what is spawning. Calls are gamefish only: jack crevalle stays in the species reference, the regulations, and the logbook, but it never headlines. A live clock refreshes to the minute, and a red or amber storm banner appears whenever a severe-weather threat is active.
Forecast and patterns
See the conditions in the future, not just the present. A bite-outlook chart draws the hour-by-hour bite score across the days ahead with the tide shape underneath, the feeding windows shaded, night darkened, hour ticks at 6, noon and 6 under each day, the start time on every strong window, and a now marker; drag a finger across it to read the exact time, bite and tide at any point, and the Feeding windows ahead list under it gives the same windows as clock ranges. Which day, and where puts a day and a place together: the best window each of the next seven days has to offer and the spot it belongs to, built from each spot's own bundled tide and current tables, so it still answers with no signal. Each day's pick can be dissected: what that run of water does at that kind of place, where to set up on it, how to fish it, the water on the mark when the window opens, the mapped habitat, and the fish the catalogue lists there with its local note. Below it, a visual daily strip shows each day's sky, temperature, wind, seas, and go/no-go run call. It also finds when a productive pattern repeats (the tide + solunar + wind + barometer setup behind the best window), so the bite is reproducible. Weather from Open-Meteo, tide from NOAA, solunar computed.
Tides
A full day read for your town: a large tide curve with the highs and lows labeled, day and night shaded with sunrise and sunset marked, the solunar feeding periods banded, and a live now marker that reads the tide model rather than the drawn line, so within half an hour of a turn it says slack instead of guessing a direction. Under the curve runs the day's tidal current wherever a NOAA current station covers the water: flood and ebb shaded by how hard the water is moving, a mark at every turn, and dead water drawn in its own grey rather than left blank. Reading the two together is the point, because slack does not fall on high water: at some stations it trails the tide by well over an hour and at others it lands within minutes of it. Pick any day in the week strip to see its curve, and read the sun and light times (first light, sunrise, sunset, last light), the moon phase and illumination, moonrise and moonset, the solunar feeding periods, and a feeding rating. Tide is bundled NOAA prediction; sun and moon are computed.
Lure color and tackle
The Find screen ends with a single What to throw section for the species you pick: the lures dialed to the live conditions, color guidance from water clarity and light (natural and translucent in clear, bright water; gold and chartreuse to cut through stain; loud high-contrast in muddy water; dark and solid for silhouette in low light and after dark), and the rig (leader, hook, and how to work it).
Light and moon
The dashboard's Tide and light card carries first light, sunrise, sunset, and last light for your town, and the moon tile shows the phase and illumination. The low-light edges at dawn and dusk are prime feeding windows.
Red tide
Strikepoint reads FWC's live Karenia brevis sampling (the official red tide source, refreshed several times a day) for the water near you and shows a status on the dashboard, Find, and spot screens: Clear when calm, amber for low, red for medium or high. It reduces the recent samples within about 25 miles to the worst reading, so a bloom on your stretch of coast shows even if the closest sample is clean, and when a bloom is moderate or high the briefing flags it. Source: FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.
Sea state and run conditions
The Seas reading is the current wave height and period near you from the free Open-Meteo marine model (shown where the model has open-water coverage). Run conditions turns wind and seas into a single go/no-go call: Good to run when both are light, Marginal when it is building (fish the protected lees), and Rough when it is time to stay inshore. It is the judgment you make before leaving the dock, not a substitute for your own eyes on the water.
Alerts
Turn on alerts with the header button. On the web a push subscription is registered and a background worker watches your water even when the app is closed: it sends a heads-up before a major solunar feeding window opens, a warning when the National Weather Service issues a severe weather warning at your location, a heads-up when a radar-tracked thunderstorm cell is bearing down on your water (at most one every 45 minutes), a notice when red tide near you escalates, a heads-up when the day-2 post-front bite window arrives, and each evening a note when tomorrow rates 4 of 5 or better for a gator trout on your water, with the best window and where to be. Weather is checked every half hour; red tide and the front stage twice a day. While the app is open it also pings on prime windows and storm warnings. On the desktop these are native system notifications. Alerts are opt-in and stop when you turn them off. Prove the alerts on More sends this device the real notifications now: a plain test, the gator note the evening run would send, and the license reminder for the soonest license on file.
Desktop app
The desktop build is optimized for a laptop or desktop: a wider workspace with the analysis screens (Trip Planner, Compare, Logbook) in the top navigation. It lives in the system tray, so closing the window keeps it running in the background and it checks for updates every few hours (the tray menu also has Open, Check for updates, and Quit). New signed versions download and install themselves, so it stays current with no reinstall.
Trip Planner
Plan a trip at home: the week ahead for your town laid out day by day, each day with its best feeding windows, the tide highs and lows with the spring or neap range, the weather (wind, seas, temperature, rain), and a go/no-go run call. Weather from Open-Meteo, tide bundled from NOAA, solunar computed.
Compare towns
Your town and its nearest neighbors side by side, so you can see where the conditions and bite line up best before you drive. Each column is a town; each row a live metric (top spot score, solunar, water, wind, tide, seas, run call, red tide). The best top-spot score and the calmest run are highlighted.
Journal
Your fishing record, read back. Every catch appears under the day it happened, with the time, what it ate, whether bait was showing, the water it came off (named as a spot where the app knows one, and linked to that spot's page), the conditions stamped at the moment it hit, your notes and your photos. A day that came off a trip also shows the hours fished and the rate. Filter it by species, or by the water the fish came off: flood or ebb where the current was measured at the time, or the tide phase where it was not, kept separate on purpose, so filtering on an ebb never returns a fish that only knew the tide was falling. Above it all, a map of every catch that carries a position, with the same Depth overlay so you can read the bottom underneath your own fish; tap a dot to jump to that catch in the record, and any positioned catch has a show on map control that flies to its dot. A day you fished that produced nothing appears too, with its hours: a blank day is a reading, and it is the half of the season a catch list silently deletes. Download backup writes the whole record to a file, Download spreadsheet writes the catches as CSV, and Restore adds back only what is missing, so importing the same file twice changes nothing and an old backup can never undo newer work. Photos stay on the device that took them. It is built entirely from what you logged; nothing is inferred.
Logbook
What actually produces leads the Logbook: the conditions your catch rate beats your own average on, measured over whole trips rather than over fish. That distinction is the point of it. Counting fish by condition tells you where you go, not where they are, because an angler who fishes the outgoing four times in five will land four fifths of their fish on the outgoing whatever it is worth. Bucketing whole trips against your own baseline removes that, and it only works because blank trips count too, which is why logging a day that produced nothing is worth as much as logging a fish. Each row shows how much better than your average it ran, over how many trips, and how far to trust it yet. Your patterns, below it, is the plain count, and says so. Deeper analysis of your own logged catches, led by catch rate: fish per hour fished, broken down by how hard the water was running, by flood or ebb, and by tide, barometer, moon and wind, with how it compares to what Strikepoint's ranking assumes. The current is the sharpest of those and the one the app itself ranks on, so it is where your own hours can most usefully disagree with the model. It also shows what the app has learned from your own water: Strikepoint ships with weights chosen by hand, and once there are enough hours behind them your catch rate moves them. In that fit a quality fish counts double, using the same definition as Your numbers (the top of the FWC slot, or your own best quarter where FWC publishes no slot), and every other fish counts once, including a fish nobody measured, because not knowing how big it was is not evidence that it was small; with no lengths recorded it is the plain catch rate. It is held back hard so a single good morning cannot rewrite the model and a rare condition with two hours behind it barely counts. The tuning is then tested against trips it has never seen, and the app says plainly when it fails that test. That section needs trips, because a count of catches only shows where you went, while a rate shows when fish fed; the hours that produced nothing are what make it honest, and the app says how many more hours it needs before the rates are worth reading. A Debriefs card tallies what the app said against what you found, trip by trip, and says plainly when the sample is too small to be a pattern. Then a satellite catch map of every GPS-stamped catch (tap a dot for the fish, its size, and the bait), the tide, moon, barometer, and water temperature most of your fish came on, a photo wall of your latest catch photos, a per-species roll-up (count, biggest, last caught), and a monthly trend. Built only from your device's logged catches through the same pure engines the learning loop uses, never invented.
Find Fish and Read the Water
Two layers. Read the Water analyzes the live tide, wind, barometer, water temperature, season, and solunar window and ranks the kinds of water that are productive right now (down-current rock at a pass, windward oyster bars, sand potholes, mangrove points, creek mouths, beach troughs, shadow lines, channel drop-offs), each with the reasoning and a search rubric for what to look for, so you can run unfamiliar ground and find your own fish. Below it, the known public-landmark spots are ranked by the same conditions, all of them, either across every species or for one you pick. The score weighs water temperature, tide, tide strength (the day's measured spring/neap range, and how hard each spot funnels it), wind, the barometer, and the feeding window. The more catches you log, the more the water read leans toward the water you actually produce on. A satellite map at the top plots every ranked spot plus nearby open-data structure, each dot colored by today's score. The curated known spots are numbered to match the Best spots list and rim-lit, while the dimmer dots are raw open-data structure. Tapping a spot (a dot, or any row in the lists) flies the map to it, rings it, and opens its details: the reason line and the drivers behind its score (what is pulling it up today, marked +, and what is holding it back, marked -), with a link to the spot page. The same drivers appear under each row in the spot list and on the spot page verdict. Each ranked spot with a current station also carries its next window on the clock, running now until a time or next from one time to another, and says not their tide when the species you picked prefers the other direction. Those windows are read from the station's published turns and each one is run through the forecast wind for that spot's exposure, so a modest run you can fish outranks a ripping one nobody can. The map also locates you by GPS, shows a distance scale, goes fullscreen, and toggles manatee zones and precipitation radar.
Numbers or trophy
For a species whose big fish behave differently from the schooling fish, Find carries a Fishing for switch: Numbers ranks the water, the spots, and the baits for a limit of fish, and Trophy ranks them for one big one. Spotted seatrout, snook and redfish carry one. A gator trout is a solitary ambush feeder that stakes out its own structure and eats fewer, larger meals in short windows, so trophy mode weighs the pothole edges, lighted docks, and drop-offs with deep water beside them, moves the best temperature to the 68 to 78 degree band the big females feed in, sets the calendar to November through April, when Florida's biggest trout are caught, with October and the fall mullet run turning them on, and swaps the shrimp under a cork for a 4 to 6 inch mullet, a big pinfish, a large topwater in low light, or a suspending twitchbait worked slow. The behavior comes from published angling and fisheries sources, not from the app, and the size that counts as a trophy is FWC's Saltwater Reel Big Fish qualifying length (24 inches for seatrout, 36 for snook, 30 for redfish). A trophy snook is a big female, a night fish on docks, bridges and the pass jetties that follows the fall mullet into the canals; a bull redfish has left the flats for deep water and gathers in the passes, on the beaches and in the deep holes for the fall spawn, schooling by size and eating crabs and cut mullet on the bottom. The gator card and its windows are seatrout only; the other two get the re-ranked spots, water read and baits. The log uses those lengths to mark a trophy on your personal bests and as the top rung of the length ladder. In trophy mode Find also carries a Gator trout today card: the regime the water temperature has put the big fish in (the 68 to 78 degree feeding band, the spring pre-spawn, the fall feed on the mullet, the early-and-late heat over 78, the winter fish under 68, which on this coast are the biggest of the year on the deep grass and in the canals and feed later in the day, the selective low-50s fish stacked in the warmest water, and the lethal cold under 48), a verdict for the day that the cold-front stage, the mullet run, the spawn, the moon and the barometer move, and today's windows on the clock (Dawn, the hour before sunrise through mid-morning; the afternoon warm-up on sun-heated shallows when the water is cold; Dusk, the hour before sunset through the last of the light; and the lighted docks after dark in warm water), each printing the sun's own marks inside it (first light, sunrise, sunset, last light) so a window that opens before sunset is never read as the time the light goes, each scored against the solunar periods and the tide turn and each saying where to be and how to fish it, and under it the craft of the anglers who catch the biggest trout for that regime, each line naming its source: the Laguna Madre and Baffin Bay guides, the Big Lake trout masters, the Gulf-coast plug specialists, the world-record holders. Every ranked spot's line then says what a big trout does with that water rather than how the conditions score. The choice sticks on the device and rides in the link, and Numbers is always the app's default.
How the locals do it
Under the ranked spots on Find, a card with the craft of the best-known anglers and guides on your coast, for the fish you chose and the month it is: Capt. Scott Moore and Capt. Rick Grassett on Tampa Bay snook, Capt. William Toney on Big Bend grouper and fall trout, Capt. Brian Sanders on Chokoloskee oyster bars, the Boca Grande hill tides, Capt. Anthony Vargas on Keys bridges, Capt. Chris Myers on Mosquito Lagoon sight fishing, the Atlantic mullet run. Every line names who said it and links to where. The handful of those rules that can be stated on the finder's own inputs also tilt the scores, by a quarter at most, and say so in the spot's reason: winter snook favour the outgoing that pulls warmed creek water over them; a Boca Grande pass on a full-moon May outgoing is the hill tide; the Atlantic beaches and inlets lift through the mullet run; a Big Bend flat on a winter low is drained and the creek holes fill; a Keys bridge fishes as the flow eases. Where the research found charter-company guides rather than named voices (the Panhandle, the St. Johns) the card says that too.
Fresh water: largemouth and the exotics
Below the saltwater species on Find, four South Florida freshwater fish: the native Florida largemouth (the winter spawn, the dry-season canals of the Conservation Areas and Okeechobee, night in summer) and three exotics, butterfly peacock bass, bullseye snakehead and clown knifefish. They have no tide, so their screen is a different read: the day scored on the water temperature, the light (peacocks feed only in daylight and by sight; snakeheads at dawn and dusk on the vegetation edges; knifefish after dark), sun, wind, the season and the front, with the windows on the clock and tomorrow's read. No gauge reads these canals, so the water temperature is the mean of three days of air temperature and every screen says it is an estimate. Where lists the canals, lakes and parks the record puts each fish in (FWC's site pages, the guides who fish them), nearest your town first with the distance, the public access, and who documents it; from a Gulf town the day is read at the water, not at home, and the card says so. The rules card carries the FWC limits (two peacocks a day, one 17 inches or longer; snakehead and knifefish unlimited, not to be moved alive) and the numbers the sources could not settle, labelled. The craft is sourced to Capt. Alan Zaremba, Capt. Corey Nowakowski, Capt. Miguel Figueredo and FWC's own tip sheets.
Guides
Under More, written guides to a place or a fish, every line sourced to who said it with a link. Big Cypress National Preserve is the model for the rest: the Tamiami Canal, Loop Road and Turner River Road canals are fresh water (largemouth, bream, oscars and Mayan cichlids, a freshwater license, the dry-season rule that drops the water and stacks the fish in the canals), and the Turner River, Halfway Creek and Barron River run brackish into salt at Chokoloskee (snook, redfish, tarpon, a saltwater license and the snook permit). Each section is tagged with its water because the license, the rules and the fish change at that line. The species guides (largemouth bass, butterfly peacock bass, clown knifefish, bullseye snakehead) lay out the fish, when, where and the way in, how the best do it, bait and tackle, and the rules, and end with what the sources could not settle.
Candidate water
Beyond the curated spots, Strikepoint carries real fishing structure (reefs, wrecks, breakwaters and jetties, groynes, and named fishing piers) pulled from OpenStreetMap for the whole Florida coast and bundled offline. Each is scored by the same live read and shown with its real coordinates, so you can run structure the catalog does not name. These are real points from open data, never invented; verify them on the water. Source: OpenStreetMap contributors.
Reefs and grouper structure
For structure fish (gag grouper), Find ranks real reef structure instead of shoreline spots: the statewide FWC artificial-reef catalog, nearshore sites in 45 feet or less, clustered from FWC's published deployments and bundled offline. Whichever town you pick, the finder ranks the reefs within range of it, weighing relief, published depth against where gags sit at today's water temperature, hard material, and season. Each site shows on the Find map numbered to match its row. Positions, depths, relief, and material are FWC-published, never invented; a reef field can span acres, so find the structure on the sounder before you drop.
Boat ramps
Every open saltwater and brackish launch near your town, from FWC's published Florida Boat Ramp Inventory: trailer ramps and kayak/canoe launches on a satellite map, with lanes, dock, trailer parking, fees, restrooms, surface, and hours where FWC publishes them (unknowns are left blank, never guessed). Tap a row to fly the map to the launch. Kayak Launches (More menu) is the same inventory filtered to FWC's hand launches, led by the surface FWC describes (a sandy kayak beach, a floating kayak dock, natural shoreline) rather than lanes and trailer spaces, which mean nothing carrying a boat. That screen also lists paddle-friendly water for today: the same spots judged the way a paddler has to, with wind weighed harder, the current you must hold against, and the carry from the nearest hand launch, and it refuses a pass or bridge running over a limit a kayak cannot hold. Ramp conditions and fees change, so verify before you tow.
Spawning now
Strikepoint tracks the inshore spawn calendar for each species: the months, the moons that concentrate it, the water temperature it needs, and the tide that releases it. The Spawning now panel reads the live conditions and tells you which fish are spawning, staging, or waiting on the water to warm, and where (snook and tarpon in the passes and beaches in summer, bull redfish at the passes in the fall, seatrout over the grass flats). A spot scores higher when a species is actively spawning right on it.
Observed water
Beside what the tables and models predict, Strikepoint reads what is being measured. The tide tile carries the nearest NOAA gauge's height against the tide table for the same minute, which is the wind-driven part of today's water: a hard north wind takes a foot off a Gulf-coast flat and the table never knows, so the tile says, for example, 0.6 ft under the table at Port Manatee, and the spot page's Depth right now adds that to the chart offset. The water tile shows the nearest NOAA thermometer in the water and yesterday's satellite sea-surface temperature for the 5 km cell over the town (NOAA CoastWatch blended analysis) beside the model figure the app runs on, and in trophy mode the gator model uses the thermometer when it is within twenty miles. A Fresh water card lists the rivers reaching your water, live from USGS, against each gauge's own median for the month: a creek mouth is a salinity front, and a flood moves the front down the bay. Every ranked spot on Find also carries its measured habitat: the share of water within half a mile that FWC has mapped as seagrass, how much of it is patchy, the length of grass edge, and from NOAA's surveyed bathymetry the depth at the mark and how close six feet of water lies; the finder scores grass cover for the schooling fish, and grass edge and deep water beside the spot for the big one. Where a spot has a surveyed bottom, the three are added together: the bottom is moved from NOAA's land datum onto the tide's low-water plane with the nearest gauge's published offset (a foot or two on this coast), then today's table and the gauge's offset go on top, giving the water on that mark right now, at the low and at the high. It shows under each ranked spot and on the spot page's Depth card, and on a flat, bar, mangrove edge or creek mouth it replaces the tide-phase guess in the finder: a flat with a foot on it is off the board whatever the phase says, and the big fish want a little more before they push up. Readings older than a few hours are not shown rather than shown stale.
Depth
Turn on Grass on the Find and spot maps to draw FWC's mapped seagrass where it lies, continuous meadow solid and patchy grass lighter so the pothole edges show, fetched for whatever the map is looking at. Turn on Depth on any map to lay the NOAA nautical chart over the satellite view: soundings, channel edges, bars and the shape of the bottom. Charted depths are printed to mean lower low water, which is the shallowest the spot normally gets, so the spot screen says how much to add to them right now and how much there will be at today's low and high. A flat marked one foot can hold three and a half at the top of a spring tide, which is the difference between a bar you can cross and one you cannot. Charts are shown for reference and are not for navigation. Source: NOAA Office of Coast Survey.
Spot detail and map
Where to work, now leads the screen: a spot is an area, not a pin, so the app reads NOAA's own survey inside it and ranks the water. The features are found on the 1/9 arc-second CUDEM, about three and a half metres a cell, which is fine enough to resolve a pothole, the drop-off and the bar, and each one has to clear a threshold to be listed at all, so a featureless flat is reported as a featureless flat rather than given three invented marks. The ranking is the tide: low water puts fish in the holes and tight to the edge, the flood carries them over the bar and onto the grass, the fall stacks them on the drop. On a pass, a jetty or a bridge it is the current rather than the depth that decides, read from the measured prediction where a station covers the water, because slack does not arrive with the tide (measured at Big Sarasota Pass, it trailed the tide by an hour or more), and there the edge fishes best moving but not ripping. A mark with too little water on it says so and drops to the bottom however well the stage suits it. Where a current station sits effectively on the spot the card also says which SIDE to work and which way to cast, from NOAA's own flood and ebb bearings: fish face into moving water and wait for what it carries, so they hold in the lee and the cast starts up-current, with a jetty the exception that takes the wall the flow piles against. Where no station is close enough it says nothing rather than guessing a side. Below that, a satellite map of the spot on free, keyless tiles, with conditions, the tide chart with the current lane under it and the name and distance of the NOAA station it reads, solunar windows, the sight-fishing light window, and today's bite forecast, which is capped by the season so a fish that has left for the year says out of season here rather than blaming the water. When to be here today turns the water this spot fishes into clock windows: the part of each run that is moving hard enough to matter, widened to cover the morning or evening bite when it touches one (and where no run does, the light stands as a window on its own, scored by whether the water moves through it), taken from the published current where a station covers it and from the tide curve elsewhere (the card says which), scored up where a feeding period or low light lands on it, marked down where the forecast wind blows the spot out, and shown as the three worth the drive in the order they happen. Locate yourself by GPS and go fullscreen, and toggle the manatee-zone overlay, a live precipitation-radar layer (RainViewer), and a heatmap of your own catches. Catches logged with a GPS fix plot at the position where they were caught; older catches without one mark the spot itself.
Storm safety
Built on free NWS severe-weather alerts plus live NEXRAD storm-cell tracking. When a thunderstorm or tornado warning covers your area, the dashboard banner and push alerts say to leave the water. Between warnings, the radar's own storm-cell table is projected onto your water: a thunderstorm-strength cell (50 dBZ or rotating) whose track passes within six miles raises the banner with its distance, direction, and minutes out, so you get the heads-up before a warning polygon is drawn. Safety aids can be delayed or wrong; never rely on them alone.
Speed zones
Where you have to slow down, on the map and on the water. The Speed zones overlay draws Florida's boating restriction areas: idle speed, slow speed, no motor and no entry. With location on, you get a banner and a buzz the moment your position crosses into one, which is the point of it, since these are enforceable and the line is not marked out there. FWC publishes them as State Manatee Protection Zones (FAC 68C-22); the app names the restriction rather than the animal because the restriction is what changes how you run the boat. Boundaries are generalized for display, so verify the exact line with FWC.
Species
A reference on every target species, tripletail included: a researched behavior profile (how and when it feeds, its forage, time-of-day pattern, seasonal movement, the structure it holds on, and presentation tactics), its best water-temperature range and prime tide, where it spawns, and an annual activity strip. The Spot Finder uses the same behavior to weight each species' water differently. Published biology and angling knowledge developed in Southwest Florida that holds across the state's inshore waters, not invented data. Tripletail is the odd one out and is treated as such: it is not a bottom-structure fish but a sight-fishing target that hangs beside floating objects, crab trap buoys and channel markers, often tipped on its side at the surface looking like debris, so it is found by looking rather than by casting.
Season Guide
Pick a species and read its year as one timeline: peak, good, and slow by month with the current month marked, plus its peak window, spawn window and where it spawns, best water temperature, and prime tide in plain language. Chips at the top list what is firing this month, and every species links straight to Find to hunt it now.
Log a catch
Logs save on this device instantly, even with no signal. Every target species in the app can be logged, and the picker defaults to the species you last hunted on Find. Logging a fish is one tap from anywhere in the app: the floating button in the corner of every screen opens the same species strip, and the Log screen has it at the top. Either records it with the time, your position, and the conditions, which are the parts you cannot recover later. The length goes on straight away: the fish you just logged offers a short ladder of one-tap sizes, and the rungs sit on the FWC rule for that species, so for a slot fish they land on short, just legal, a good one, the top of the slot, and over it, with the exact number one tap further on. Any catch in the list that has no length carries the same ladder, which is how a season logged before the ladder existed gets measured from the couch. Bait, photos and notes can wait until you are off the water, and every catch has an Edit control for them, for its photos, and for anything tapped wrong in a boat. Photos can be added, replaced or removed on a catch at any time; the changes apply when you save, so cancelling leaves the catch as it was. Tapping the same species twice within a few minutes asks whether it is really a second fish before it logs one, and the last catch can be undone outright. The full form is still there behind Log with full details when you want to fill everything in at once. Start a trip when you hit the water and end it when you come off, so the hours that produced nothing are recorded too; they are what make the rest of the numbers mean anything. Starting a trip also freezes what the app was saying, the top spots, the best windows and the gator day, and ending it asks two questions, did the window hold and did the spot hold, beside the fish you logged; the answers are the debrief, kept with the trip and tallied on the Logbook. Typing a length into a catch judges it on the spot against the FWC rule (short, keeper, or over the slot) and against your own log (a personal best, and by how much). Species, bait, size, release, whether bait was showing, the measured current at the moment it hit, and photos (take one with the camera or add from the library) are captured per catch, along with the conditions at the time. Photos are scaled on the device; a thumbnail rides with the catch to a paired device, and the full-size photo stays on the device that took it. When the device has a GPS fix, the position is stamped automatically. You can also set it yourself: Set on map opens a satellite view, and tapping the water (or dragging the pin) marks exactly where the fish hit. A hand-placed pin wins over the GPS fix, which matters when location is denied, the phone is still holding a fix from the ramp, or the catch gets logged back at the dock; on a desktop it is the only way to position a catch. A catch that is already logged can still be placed: every catch in the recent list carries an Add location control (Move location once it has one), which opens the same map and saves as you drop the pin. The picker takes the whole screen, because placing a pin on the right bar is a precision job done with a fingertip, and it opens on named water rather than on your current position, which for a catch logged hours ago is wherever the phone is sitting now. A row of nearby spots along the top jumps the map straight to one. Positions feed the catch heatmap on the spot map and the catch map in the Logbook, and a catch still saves fine with no position at all.
Today's harvest
A bag tracker on the Log screen. Each fish you keep today is counted per species against the bag limits of your own waters: your town sets the jurisdiction (Gulf, Atlantic, or Keys) and the count runs on your local calendar day. The badge stays green under the limit, turns amber at it, and red over it. Limits are a convenience copy; verify at myfwc.com before keeping fish.
Device sync
Link your phone and your desktop (More, Device sync) so a fish logged on the water shows up at home, and vice versa. Turn on sync on one device and scan the QR code it shows with the other; the second device links itself with no typing (a short code entry remains as the fallback). There is no account; the code is the only identity, your catches stay on each device as the source of truth, and syncing just merges the two sets. Catches push when you log them and pull automatically whenever the app opens or comes back to the foreground, so a linked device is always current.
Your patterns
Your numbers on the Log screen read by the size of the fish rather than the number of them: the biggest you have ever recorded, and how many of your measured fish were good ones. A good one is defined by the FWC rule the app already carries, at or above the top of the slot, which is the best fish the rule lets you keep; where FWC publishes a plain minimum and no slot, your own best quarter stands in and the app says which of the two it used. Only snook, redfish, spotted seatrout and gag grouper carry a rule, so those four get slot verdicts and the rest get personal bests only. Under five measured fish it reports how many were measured instead, because a share of two fish is two fish and not a rate. Personal bests have their own card: the biggest of each species with the day, the bait, its photo, and whether it beat the top of the slot. Every fish at or past FWC's Reel Big Fish length also appears in Your trophies, with the conditions stamped when it hit, so the next one can be compared against the water the last one came on. The Log screen also shows the conditions you catch fish in most (for example a falling barometer or the outgoing tide), counted straight from your own catches and the conditions stamped on each; it only reports a pattern when there is a clear leader, and gets sharper the more you log.
Regulations
A convenience copy of the major FL inshore/nearshore rules, statewide, by county: Gulf, Atlantic, and a dedicated Florida Keys (Monroe) rule set with the values FWC actually applies there (Southwest-region snook, redfish, and trout; Atlantic grouper rules). Seasons about to turn leads the page whenever a harvest season opens or shuts in the next two weeks, naming the last day you can keep one and the day it goes shut, so the turn of a season is not something you find out about on the water. The slot check shows whether a fish falls short, lands in the keeper slot, or runs over, with bag limit, season, and each rule's special notes. Snook, redfish and spotted seatrout are managed on FWC's nine regional management areas rather than by coast, and those regions do not share a rule, so what you see for each is the rule for the region your water actually sits in, with FWC's own boundary printed under it. Snook: from Sarasota Bay north the fall harvest opens September 1, while in the Charlotte Harbor and Southwest regions, everything south of the Venice Municipal Airport line through the Keys, it stays shut until October 1. Redfish: catch and release only in the Indian River Lagoon, and the vessel limit is 4 in the Panhandle, Big Bend and Northeast against 2 everywhere else. Seatrout: the bag is 5 in the Big Bend and 2 in the Indian River Lagoon against 3 elsewhere, the Panhandle shuts for February and the Indian River Lagoon for November and December, and the one-fish-over-19-inches allowance does not exist in the Indian River Lagoon or the Northeast. Four counties straddle a line where one of those answers changes, Franklin, Wakulla, Sarasota and Volusia, and there the page asks which side you fish. Gag and other seasons are set year to year and the Keys carry extra species rules, so always verify at myfwc.com before keeping a fish.
My Licenses
Keep a copy of your FWC record on this device (More, My Licenses) in the shape FWC keeps it: your name, customer ID and date of birth, then each license and permit with its own term and dates, since a fishing license and a snook permit run out on different days. Readable with no signal. The page and the Today screen warn when any of them is expiring or expired, and when alerts are on the phone is pushed a reminder 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 days ahead and on the day. A one-tap import link can fill the record in. It is a personal reference copy, not an official credential; carry your official license in the Fish|Hunt Florida app.
AI briefing
Optional, and the app is fully usable without it. The dashboard can write a short briefing over the day's conditions. It runs on your Claude subscription when one is available (no per-use charge), and only falls back to your own Anthropic API key if you add one (stored on your device). It is on-demand and cached against the day's conditions, so it does not make constant calls. The rankings stay fully deterministic; the model only writes the summary and is told to use only the computed facts, never to invent spots or numbers.
Terms on the instruments
The working vocabulary behind the readings.
Solunar major / minorThe day's feeding periods, keyed to the moon. Majors are the two longer windows when the moon is directly overhead or underfoot; minors are the shorter windows at moonrise and moonset. The solunar rating scores the day 1 to 5.
Spring vs neap tideSpring tides, around the new and full moon, move the most water: strong current, strong feed. Neap tides, around the quarter moons, move the least. Strikepoint judges each day against the station's own range, not a statewide yardstick.
MLLW datumTide heights are measured from Mean Lower Low Water, the long-term average of each day's lower low tide at the station. A negative height is water below that average, not a dry bottom.
Barometer trendThe direction air pressure is moving. Falling pressure ahead of weather often switches fish on; steady is neutral; a sharp rise behind a front usually means a tougher bite.
Hill tideThe extra strong outgoing tide around the new and full moon, a spring tide ebb that flushes bait through the passes. The classic early summer tarpon tide.
Where the data comes from
Tide highs and lows are NOAA CO-OPS predictions, bundled offline per town, and the current predictions are bundled offline the same way for the twenty-two stations the app's towns and spots use, so the water's timing survives losing signal. Where NOAA runs a current station near your water the app uses its published current predictions: slack and maximum flood and ebb, which do not happen at the same time as the tide's highs and lows. Weather, wind, the barometer, and the multi-day forecast come from Open-Meteo (free and keyless), and water temperature, sea state (waves and swell), and the water-temp trend come from the Open-Meteo marine model. Storm and severe-weather alerts are the US National Weather Service (NWS), and storm-cell tracks are the NEXRAD storm-attribute tables republished by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. Red tide (Karenia brevis) is FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute sampling. Regulations are a convenience copy of FWC rules, so always verify at myfwc.com. Nautical charts and their soundings are the NOAA Office of Coast Survey electronic charts. Fishing structure (reefs, wrecks, jetties, and piers) comes from OpenStreetMap contributors, artificial reefs come from FWC's published statewide reef deployments, boat ramps come from FWC's Florida Boat Ramp Inventory, and the satellite basemap is Esri World Imagery. Species illustrations are public-domain 19th-century U.S. Fish Commission plates (drawings by H. L. Todd and contemporaries), via the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank and Wikimedia Commons. Observed water level and water temperature are NOAA CO-OPS gauges, satellite sea-surface temperature is the NOAA CoastWatch Geo-polar blended analysis (5 km, daily), river discharge and monthly medians are USGS Water Services (the Caloosahatchee gauge at S-79 is the same flow the SFWMD publishes), mapped seagrass is FWC FWRI's statewide seagrass layer, and surveyed depth is NOAA NCEI's topo-bathy DEM mosaic. Every source is free and keyless, so the app costs nothing to run, and it falls back to bundled data offline.
Cost and privacy
Strikepoint runs on free, keyless data sources, so it costs nothing to operate. Your catches and logs stay on your device until you choose to sync.

Conditions, forecasts, and safety features are aids, not a navigation, weather, or rescue service, and can be delayed or wrong. Regulations are a convenience copy; verify current rules at myfwc.com.