Fishing forecast

Fishing weather is the combination of conditions that shows up on days anglers actually catch fish. Across hundreds of thousands of catch reports, the season carries more weight than any single condition, and temperature — of the water above all — is the strongest weather signal after it. Wind and air pressure weigh far less than angling folklore suggests.

Our model shows that rain itself has very little impact on catch rates. Dry days score slightly better, but the difference is minimal. What matters more is what comes with rain: changing pressure, wind and cloud cover.

Wind is one of the weakest factors in our national model — and it used to be by far the strongest, at roughly half of it. That turned out to be a measurement artefact. The model compares days when fish were caught against days when they were not, and those comparison days were being drawn from different waters, so it could tell the two apart on location instead of on weather. Wind is the most strongly patterned weather variable across a map, so it absorbed that signal and looked like the answer. Once the comparison days were matched to the same waters and months as the catches, wind fell from about half the model to a few percent. It still matters on the bank — it decides which shore the food drifts towards — but as a reason to pick one day over another it is weak, and we would rather correct ourselves than keep a number we no longer trust.

Warmer is generally better. The model shows catch rates increasing as temperatures rise, with the sweet spot in the warmer months. Water temperature from Rijkswaterstaat stations confirms this: fish are more active in warmer water.

Early morning and evening tend to be the most productive. Fish are generally more active during these transitions around dawn and dusk. Moon phase also shows up as a factor in our model, though its effect is modest compared to weather.

It depends on the species. Eel for example becomes noticeably more active during new moon and lunar eclipses because it prefers dark nights. Pikeperch is the opposite: it hunts by sight at night and thrives under a bright full moon. Our species-specific models capture these differences.

Air pressure is one of the weaker factors in our model — below every temperature feature. Fish do sense pressure through their swim bladder, but we found no evidence for the sudden feeding switch many fishing sites describe.

Our model shows that clearer skies tend to score slightly better for overall catch rates. This goes against the common belief that overcast skies are always better. That said, the effect is modest and likely varies by species, since some predators prefer low light conditions.

Water level is one of the weakest factors in our national model. It once ranked much higher, but that turned out to be a measurement artefact: the model was reading height above NAP, which mostly encodes where a gauge stands rather than how the water is behaving. Measured properly, as the change over three days, it barely registers nationally — though for some river species it is still the single most important driver.

No. The general forecast on this page uses a model trained on all species combined. But each species reacts differently to weather conditions. That is why we also train separate models per species, which you can explore on our species pages. View all species →