About The Bite Reports

I'm not a guide and I'm not a pro. I've got a full-time job in technology, and I love to fish, when work turns me loose early.

Over the years I've had days on the water I'll never forget. I've also had a few I'd rather not talk about. The ones that stung worst were when friends made the drive to fish with me. You plan it for weeks. You get the boat ready. You tell them about the brush that's been loaded every trip. Then you spend eight hours proving you don't know as much as you thought you did. Same lake, same brush, same everything — different day.

That's what got me. Not getting beat; that's fishing. It was not knowing why. There had to be something separating the good days from the stinkers, and it wasn't luck.

So I went looking for help, and what I found was mostly the same thing dressed up different ways: the season and the moon phase. That's it. A calendar and a number. Nobody was accounting for the front that rolled through Tuesday night, or the water still hanging cold from a two-week cool snap, or the fact that they'd been pulling water hard for three days straight. Those are the things that decide whether you load the boat or ride home quiet.

So I built the thing I wanted.

The Bite Reports looks at everything I'd want to know before I decided when to go:

Season and where the fish are in it — staging, pre-spawn, spawn, post-spawn, summer, fall
Water temperature and spawn timing — modeled per lake, and whether the year is running ahead of or behind normal
Weather that actually matters — barometric pressure and which way it's moving, frontal timing, wind, cloud cover, rain
Moon phase — it counts, it's just not the whole story
Generation and current — on the lakes and rivers where that's the difference between a good day and a dead one

All of it, together, for the specific area or body of water you fish, on the days you're thinking about going.

I'll be straight with you: this is not a guarantee. Nothing is. Fish don't read forecasts, and anybody who tells you they've got it solved is selling something. What I can tell you is that this is the most complete look at the conditions I know how to build — and it beats guessing, which is what most of us have been doing for a long time.

If you are a great crappie fisherman, like many of you are, then my hope is that The Bite Reports will be another tool to make you even better.

If you are an average crappie fisherman like myself, I truly believe this will really help you be much better and avoid those days where you did nothing wrong yet nothing you did worked.

Tight lines, and thank you for trying The Bite Reports.
Brad