What Bassai
actually tracks.

What fish. Free-form text that defaults to Largemouth Bass but accepts any species — smallmouth, spotted bass, crappie, catfish, whatever you're targeting. Not locked to a dropdown so off-species catches don't require extra taps.

How heavy. Entered manually or auto-suggested by Scale OCR — Bassai reads the digits off your scale photo so you don't have to type them. The suggestion sits in a banner until you confirm it; dismissing it clears the banner permanently.

Exact moment of the catch. Pulled from photo EXIF when you import a photo; defaults to "now" for manual entries. Drives all hourly weather and solunar lookups — the precision matters.

Precise coordinates of this fish. From photo EXIF GPS tag when available — your camera logs where it was standing when you pressed the shutter. Not stored for manual entries. Sent only to the weather, water-gauge, and reverse-geocoding services that need a location to fetch data near your trip — and nowhere else; never exported, sold, or shared with anyone.

What you threw. Bassai's photo AI reads the lure in the frame — color, style, rigging — and suggests a label you can confirm with one tap. Stored as accepted text once confirmed.

Rod, reel, or setup visible in the photo. Same vision pass as lure detection. Useful for pattern-matching gear choices against conditions across trips.

Visual read from the photo. The AI estimates whether water in the frame is clear, stained, or murky — a quick cross-check against the gauge turbidity reading.

Anything the structured fields don't capture. Retrieve bait, erratic retrieve, specific bank structure, snag pattern. Searchable across your log.

Ambient air temperature at catch time. Cold fronts drop surface water temperature behind them — tracking air temp explains why fish moved shallow or deep between sessions.

Instantaneous barometric pressure at the catch moment. Bass lateral-line sensitivity responds to pressure changes. The absolute value matters less than whether it's been rising or falling — which is why Bassai also records the 24-hour trend separately.

Change in barometric pressure from 24 hours before the trip start to trip start. Positive = rising (good), negative = falling (front approaching or passing). This is the metric most guides use when deciding whether to go out — Bassai records it automatically for every trip.

Average wind speed at catch time. Wind-driven current concentrates baitfish on windward banks and creates oxygen-rich surface chop. Pairing wind direction with catch location reveals which banks produce on which wind.

Wind direction in degrees (0 = north, 90 = east). Stored as degrees so you can compute windward/leeward orientation relative to any bank.

Percentage of sky covered by clouds. Overcast skies reduce light penetration and ambient UV, which pulls bass out of deeper cover and into shallower ambush positions. Full cloud cover (100%) is often the best topwater window of the day.

Rainfall in the hour preceding the catch. Light rain creates surface disturbance that masks presentation; heavy rain washes nutrients and bait into the lake from drainages — both affect where fish stage.

Short human-readable summary derived from cloud cover and precipitation: Clear, Partly Cloudy, Overcast, Light Rain, Rain, and so on. Used for quick filtering.

Surface water temperature at the gauge. The single most important number for understanding bass depth and metabolism. Bass feed most aggressively between 60–75 °F; outside that range they slow down and require slower presentations.

Lake or river stage at the gauge. Absolute level tells you whether typical bank cover is above or below water. Impoundments managed for hydropower or flood control can swing several feet in a week.

Change in water level from 3 days prior to the trip. Positive = rising water, negative = falling. This is the most actionable water-condition number in the log — rising water pushes bass into flooded vegetation; falling water pulls them back to main-lake structure. Trend matters more than absolute level.

Stream discharge in cubic feet per second. Relevant for river systems, tailwaters, and tributary mouths. High CFS pushes fish to eddy pockets behind current breaks; low CFS in summer concentrates fish near oxygenated inflows.

Water clarity measured in formazin nephelometric units. The practical scale: below 5 FNU = clear (go natural colors, finesse), 5–20 FNU = stained (chartreuse or white works), above 20 FNU = muddy (loud rattles, high contrast). Bassai pulls this from government gauges — no manual estimation needed.

USGS station that sourced these readings, plus its distance from your trip center in miles. Gauge data degrades with distance — showing you the source lets you weight it appropriately.

Phase of the tide at the moment of each catch: Rising, Falling, High Slack, or Low Slack. Derived by interpolating the full day curve at the catch timestamp. Slack periods — the 30-minute window around each extreme — are fished differently than moving water.

Instantaneous water level at catch time, referenced to Mean Lower Low Water (MLLW) — the US navigation standard. Useful for correlating catches to specific depths over structure.

Minutes until the next high or low tide event. Negative values mean you just passed an extreme and are in the slack window. Positive values count down to the next one. Lets you answer "was this bite 45 minutes before the drop?" without mental math.

Whether the next extreme is a high (H) or low (L) tide. Combined with the time field: "38 minutes to high" or "12 minutes past low, still in slack."

The NOAA station and its distance from your trip. Tide timing shifts with distance from the prediction station — a station 80 km away may be off by 30–45 minutes. Shown so you can apply local knowledge.

Fractional moon phase at catch time. 0.0 = new moon, 0.5 = full moon, 1.0 = new moon again. Stored numerically so you can filter or group by phase range. Also stored as a human-readable name: New Moon, Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full Moon, and so on.

Time the moon crosses the meridian overhead. This is the center of the solunar major feeding window (roughly ±1 hour around transit). The strongest bite periods in Solunar theory align with moon overhead and moon underfoot.

Anti-transit — moon directly opposite, underfoot. Second major feeding window. Gravitational pull is nearly as strong as overhead transit; many guides find it produces equally well.

Time the moon rises above the horizon. Bounds the solunar minor feeding window around moonrise (roughly ±30 minutes). Minor windows are shorter than major but still represent elevated feeding probability.

Time the moon sets below the horizon. Second minor window. Note: on some days the moon doesn't rise or set within the 24-hour window — these fields are nil on those days.

Civil sunrise at the catch location. The hour after sunrise is consistently one of the top two bite windows of the day — bass transition from overnight holding areas to morning feeding flats. Exact time varies by latitude and date.

Civil sunset at the catch location. The second peak daily window. Evening bites often run longer than morning ones as water temperature drops from the day's high.

Raw GPS coordinates captured continuously during a live trip. Stored at original precision for future re-analysis (speed calculation, heat mapping). Douglas-Peucker simplification runs at render time — the raw points are never discarded.

Device-reported speed at each breadcrumb sample. Nil at very low speeds where the platform doesn't report a confident value. Useful for distinguishing trolling passes from anchored-and-casting positions.

CoreLocation's uncertainty radius for each point. Values above ~100 m mean temporary GPS lock loss — the map renderer uses this to skip noisy points when drawing a clean polyline.

Coordinates of the tagged spot. Drop a pin on a laydown, dock, point break, or any feature you want to return to. Pinned without leaving the Live Trip view — two taps, back to fishing.

Four categories: Vegetation (grass edge, pad field, hydrilla), Structure (dock, laydown, brush pile, rock pile), Hard Bottom (gravel, rock, shell), and Soft Bottom (silt, mud, clay flat). Category is optional — you can drop a spot pin without tagging it.

Spot (pin you want to revisit), Note (text memo attached to a location), or Scene Photo (photo not tied to a specific catch). All three render as distinct pins on the trip map.

Free-form text for spot and note markers. "Current seam here at 2 CFS," "dock gone after flood," "bait ball at 6 AM." These stay on your device and are never used for community aggregation.