Solunar & Bite Forecast

The astronomy here is real and computed for your exact location — moon transits, rises and sets from the same lunar model as our star tools (verified in tests). The solunar theory — that fish feed hardest during these windows — is angling tradition dating to John Alden Knight's 1926 tables: beloved, plausible around dawn/dusk overlaps, and never scientifically settled. Plan with it, but let the fish vote.

Two good stretches a month, not one

The tradition rates days near both new moon and full moon as best, so the rating runs on half the lunar month — a cycle of 14.77 days rather than 29.53. Across 2026:

The right-hand column is not a second count. Syzygies come every 14.77 days, so the distance to the nearest one never exceeds half of that — 7.38 days, a quarter of the lunar month — and it is spread evenly across that span. The thresholds at 1.5, 3 and 5 days carve it into bands, and the widths alone predict the counts to within a day on every row.

Note also where the scale stops. Sweeping every possible phase, the rating only ever returns 2, 3, 4, 5. There is no such thing as a one-fish day — the worst the calendar can say about a date is two out of five, which is worth knowing before reading a 2 as a warning rather than as the floor.

The phase label and the star rating use different windows

The two lines on the readout come from different functions with different thresholds. The name calls it a new moon within ±0.97 days of the exact phase; the rating awards five fish within ±1.5 days. The rating window is 1.54× wider.

So 37% of top-rated days show up under a crescent or gibbous heading, and the reverse never happens — which follows from the windows rather than from the sample, since every phase inside the narrower one is inside the wider one by construction.

Neither function is wrong. A phase name describes what the moon looks like and a rating makes a claim about fishing; they were never obliged to share a boundary. But the readout puts them on adjacent lines, where "waning crescent — 5/5 day" reads like a contradiction rather than two answers to two questions.

The windows walk around the clock

The major periods track the moon's transits, and the moon crosses the meridian later each day. Measured off this page's own astronomy:

Over 180 days the drift lands on the familiar 50 minutes. The word "about" is doing real work, though: day to day it runs from 40 to 66 minutes, because the moon's orbit is elliptical and it does not move at a constant rate — a spread of 26 minutes around a mean of 51. Which means a short sample does not converge on the answer, it lands somewhere in the neighbourhood: eighteen days gives 48.4, only 2.1 off but four times further from the truth than the long window, with nothing in it to say which way it is wrong.

The practical consequence is that a good window is a moving target. 25% of days put the moon's upper transit within 90 minutes of sunrise or sunset — the overlap the tradition rates highest — and which days those are shifts by most of an hour every day.