About Us
We grew up fishing the Southeast coast, Florida and Georgia mainly. Bone Tide is our attempt to hand that knowledge to everybody else.
Bone Tide is a small operation on the Georgia coast. Not a tech company that decided fishing looked like a good market. We are anglers who got tired of watching people burn a Saturday on water that was never going to produce.
If you grew up around it, you already know the pattern. Somebody's grandfather could look at the sky, the water and a calendar and tell you whether it was worth going. That knowledge took decades to build and it mostly dies with the person who has it. Meanwhile everybody else drives to the ramp on the one morning they had free, fishes dead slack water in a high blue-sky barometer, catches nothing, and decides they're bad at fishing.
They're not bad at fishing. They went at the wrong time.
Fish don't feed randomly. They feed on conditions. Once you can see the conditions, you stop guessing. That is the whole idea behind Bone Tide.
Bone Tide Co.We learned to fish in Florida and Georgia and that is the water we know in our bones. The app was never built for one stretch of coast though.
Bone Tide covers the Southeast, the Gulf, the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast and the West Coast, and every one of them gets the same treatment. Local tide stations and buoys. A species list that matches what actually swims there. A field guide with more than two hundred fish in it, each with the quick version: what it is, what it eats, how to tell it apart from the thing that looks just like it, and the size and bag limits for the state you are standing in.
That last part took the longest. Regulations change by state and by season, and getting them wrong costs somebody a ticket, so we check them.
Bone Tide reads a handful of conditions for the exact spot you're fishing and turns them into one number, your Good Bite Score, plus the window of the day worth being on the water for. Here's what goes into it and why each one matters.
Current is the engine. Moving water pushes bait against structure and lets predators sit still and eat. Slack water at the top or bottom of the tide shuts that down. When the tide moves matters more than whether it's high or low.
Fish feel pressure changes in their swim bladder before you feel them in your knees. A falling barometer ahead of weather often turns them on hard. A high, flat, bluebird-sky reading is the classic tough day.
Direction matters more than speed. The right wind stacks bait on a bank and puts a chop on the surface that makes fish bold. The wrong wind muddies your water and flattens your day. Same forecast speed, opposite result.
Solunar timing means where the moon is relative to you, not just whether it's full. These periods stack with the tide. When a major window lands on moving water, that's the morning you call in sick.
Every species has a range where it feeds hard, a range where it's sluggish, and a range where it leaves. Redfish and trout don't want the same water, so the score shifts depending on what you're actually targeting.
None of these work alone. One bad factor can cancel three good ones, and when several line up at once you get the days people talk about all year. Sorting that out is the part the app does for you.
We don't invent conditions. Everything feeding your score is real observed and forecast data, pulled for the station and buoy nearest to the spot you picked:
- NOAA CO-OPS: tide predictions and observed water temperature from the coastal station network.
- NDBC buoys: real offshore and inshore observations for wind, waves and water temp.
- Marine and atmospheric forecasts: barometric pressure, wind direction and speed through the day.
- Solunar calculation: moon position and major/minor periods computed for your coordinates.
Public data, read properly, for your spot. The judgment about how much each one counts is ours, and it's the part we spent the time on.
We don't sell your spots. Your saved locations are yours, and a pin you keep private stays private. We don't pretend a bad day is a good one to keep you opening the app. If the score is low, it says so and tells you to stay home.
You wake up, check the app, and your spot is showing a good number. Tide starts moving around seven, wind is out of the right quarter. So you go.
You land a few and log them as you go. Every catch puts bones in your account, and turning one loose adds a few more on top, because a fish that swims off is a fish somebody else gets to catch.
Then you spend them. Take a chunk off a shirt this week, or let them stack up and take the shirt for nothing. Either way you earned it out on the water.
Bone Tide is built on the Georgia coast for anybody who fishes salt. Gear's in the shop, and the app is coming to iOS.
Shop the gear See the app →