The Story
It started with a notebook. Scribbled flies, half-remembered weather, and a nagging feeling that there were patterns hiding in the data — if only the data were any good.
So we built a diary. Not a spreadsheet or a social feed — a proper bankside tool designed for cold hands and bright screens. Tap to set up your fly and method, then log catches, changes, and losses with a tap or a voice command while you fish. The app handles the weather, the GPS, and the timestamps.
Then we realised: if one angler's diary is useful, a thousand are transformative. Aggregate the data across venues, cross-reference with weather, and suddenly you can answer questions that individual experience never could. Which flies work when pressure is falling? Which banks produce in an east wind? When does the evening rise actually start?
That's what It's Catching! does. The diary is the foundation — every session logged makes the advice smarter, the venue data richer, and the whole platform more valuable for everyone who uses it.
The Data
We've analysed over 47,000 fishing sessions across 809 UK venues — from published reports to passport catch data. Every session is matched to historical weather (354,000 records) and catalogued against 556 normalised fly patterns.
That's the foundation. The diary is the future. Every session logged adds real, structured, GPS-tagged, weather-matched data that no amount of report scraping can replicate. The platform gets smarter every day.
For Fisheries
Fishery managers get something they've never had: automatic, structured catch returns from every angler using the diary at their water. No chasing, no illegible cards, no data entry. Just clean data they can use to manage their fishery better.
The Team
Built by a group of anglers who got tired of guessing. More details coming soon.
