Submarius
What is a Bite Score?
Published April 16, 2026 · Last updated September 2, 2026
A Bite Score is a single number between 0 and 10 that predicts how active fish will be at a given time and place. It's the answer to the question every angler is really asking when they check an app the night before: "is tomorrow going to be worth the drive?"
The scale.
What goes into the score.
Rising, falling, or slack. Tide changes are documented feeding triggers: current moves bait, predators follow. Score peaks in the 90 minutes on either side of a turn.
Bigger tides = more water moving = more bait concentration. Spring tides (new and full moons) boost the score; neap tides (quarter moons) reduce current-driven feeding.
New and full moons align sun and moon gravitationally → stronger tides. Quarter moons are weaker. Full moon bright overnight = fish may feed at night and be slower at dawn.
The "major" and "minor" feeding periods anchored to moon transit times. Evidence is mixed; we include it as a contributing factor but don't overweight it relative to hard-data inputs like tide.
Falling pressure before a front = classic pre-storm bite. Stable high pressure = stable fishing. Sharp rises post-front often mean slow fishing for 24–48 hours.
Wind drives presentation difficulty and sometimes thermal mixing. Water temp trend relative to species preferences (once we surface per-species scoring in Pro) nudges the score.
Why a single score instead of a dashboard?
Dashboards ask you to be a fisheries biologist. Submarius ships a trained opinion: here's the one number, and here's the one sentence explaining the driver. Time-constrained anglers don't want to interpret six graphs before sunrise. Dedicated anglers still have access to every factor (tap and drill in) but the default is decisive.
How does it differ from Solunar apps?
Classic solunar apps (Solunar Tables, Fishing Times) compute major/minor windows from lunar geometry and stop there. The Bite Score treats solunar as one factor among several. Tide has more weight. Current conditions (wind, pressure) have weight too. The output is the weighted whole, not just lunar astronomy.
Where does the data come from?
Open-Meteo Marine + Forecast APIs for waves, swell, wind, sea-level pressure, and water temp. NOAA Tides API and harmonic predictions for tide. Custom astronomy calculations for moon phase and solunar windows. Self-hosted geocoding via OpenStreetMap Nominatim. No paid black-box providers, all sources are publicly verifiable.
Common questions.
A Bite Score is a 0-to-10 number predicting how active fish will be at a given time and location. It aggregates tide stage and tidal range, moon phase and position, solunar major/minor windows, barometric pressure trend, wind, and water temperature. In Submarius, the score is computed hourly for the next eight days and broken down into explainable factors you can tap for details.
We compute each factor on a 0–10 sub-scale (e.g., tide: 8 during a turning tide, 5 during slack neap), weight each factor by its known influence on feeding activity, and produce a weighted average. Every factor is transparent: tap any tile in the app to see the number, the reasoning, and the 24-hour trend.
The inputs are well established in fisheries research. Tidal turns and spring tides are documented feeding triggers. Solunar theory has mixed evidence, so we include it as a moderate weight factor rather than a dominant one. Barometric drops correlate with feeding activity in many species. The score is rule based today; a learned correction trained on real catch reports is planned once enough accumulate.
Related.
- Bite score in the ocean conditions glossary.
- The Submarius fishing app — where the score lives.
- Fishing conditions by location.