At the end of 2025 I built myself a little fishing site. I wanted to know one thing: should I go fishing today, and where? Around Newcastle and Lake Macquarie that depends on tide, wind, swell, water temperature and what’s in season, and I was tired of piecing it together from five different apps. So I let a website do it for me. It scores 31 local spots through the day and gives one answer. Fish Newy. That was supposed to be it.
Then people started turning up. They come back, they check it before they load the car. I didn’t plan for that. It still feels a bit strange.
The big fishing apps are built for scale. Global platforms, millions of users, the fisher somewhere down in the data. Fair enough, that’s their business. Fish Newy knows one region, and I’d like to keep it exactly that way. Newcastle has a proper fishing culture, the kind where someone has stood on the same breakwall every winter for thirty years. If the site saves a local a wasted trip now and then, that’s the whole point of it.
It has a blog now too. The site writes the water down once a day, sea temperature, rain, swell, what scored best. A small script compares the days, and when something notable happens, say the water coming right for a species, it drops a draft into my notes with the numbers already filled in. I write the rest, or I bin it. Most days nothing happens. That’s fine.
The locals out-fish me by decades, no question. All I bring is the habit of checking the numbers every day and writing down what I see. That, and whatever evenings are left over.