Catch log tied to tide and wind

The idea

Surf anglers already believe conditions decide everything. They keep tide apps, wind apps, and solunar calendars open side by side, then try to remember whether that good night at the jetty was two hours before high on a south-west wind or after it. Memory is doing the job a database should do, and memory loses.

The wedge is auto-capture. The angler logs one photo and a species; the app silently attaches tide stage, wind, and moon phase from NOAA at that moment and place. After ten catches at a spot, the pattern report writes itself. No incumbent does the join between personal catches and public conditions data, which is odd because both halves already exist.

Who pays

The buyer is the committed shore angler who already pays for Tides4Fishing pro tiers or Fishbrain and owns several hundred pounds of rods. Price at 30 dollars a year for the insights tier, with logging free to build the habit. Distribution runs through surf fishing Facebook groups, r/SurfFishing, and YouTube channels whose whole content model is decoding conditions.

MVP scope

• One-tap catch entry: photo, species, optional length and lure
• Automatic conditions snapshot from NOAA (tide stage, wind, water level) plus moon phase
• Spot clustering with a map of catch pins
• Best conditions for this spot summary after 10 logs, behind the paid tier
• Offline queue that backfills conditions when signal returns
• Skip for v1: social feeds, gear tracking, forecasting future bite windows, Android widgets

Build TideBook, a React Native app (Expo) for surf and pier anglers that ties every catch to the exact conditions it happened in.

Core flow: angler taps Log Catch, takes a photo, picks a species from a searchable list, optionally adds length and lure. On save, the app grabs the phone's GPS position and timestamp, then fetches from the NOAA Tides and Currents API: tide stage (rising/falling, hours from high), water level, and nearest-station wind speed and direction. Also compute moon phase locally. Store all of it as a conditions snapshot on the catch row in Supabase (Postgres, magic-link auth via Supabase Auth).

Screens: Home (recent catches feed), Log Catch, Catch Detail (photo plus full conditions card), Spots (map of catch clusters), and Spot Insights.

Spot Insights is the payoff: once a spot has 10 or more logged catches, show a summary like best tide stage, best wind quadrant, best moon phase, computed by simple frequency ranking, with catch counts as evidence. Lock this screen behind a subscription at 30 dollars per year; logging stays free forever.

Non-obvious details: cache the nearest NOAA station ID per spot so offline logs can backfill conditions when connectivity returns, and queue failed API fetches in a local retry table. Cluster catches into spots automatically using a 500 m radius, with manual rename.