August on the water: too much green

I love green. Green means good to go, red means stop.

So I could make everything green here. But that is not the idea. You need a lot of red and orange to appreciate the green, to feel that today or tomorrow is a special day to go and catch a fish.

I look at Fish Newy every day myself. And through July it looked too green to me. Can that be true? Was July really such a spectacular month? Or was my engine not fine-tuned and bold enough to go for red as well, and let the green shine?

So I raised the bar at the end of July. August is the first month scored front to back on the new setting. Eight days came back golden, out of thirty-one. On the old setting the same month would have given twenty-five. July, rescored, drops from eleven to two.

And then this rabbit hole opened up, and I jumped right in.

The rabbit hole

I love getting emails from people who use the site. It means there is somebody out there with a phone in his hand, standing on a wall somewhere, and not just me and a server talking to each other.

This one came at the end of August, with a photo of his screen attached. Fish Newy was sending him to the low tide at Redhead Beach. The Redhead page, same site, one tap away, said fish the high.

Is that normal, he asked.

No. It had been wrong since about autumn. Ahem.

The feeding times, the ones that say when fish are likely to switch on, had come loose from the moon. They were sitting on the wrong tide and had been for months. So every spot where the high is the one to fish had been arguing with its own page all winter.

Nobody said anything. I did not notice either, and I look at this thing every morning.

I am happy to announce: It is fixed. Both pages read the same tide data now.

The water

Off Newcastle, 18.2 degrees on average in August. In July it was 18.8. Six tenths of a degree in a month.

You would not feel that through a wetsuit. The fish will.

Thirty-one days logged, so this is the first complete month in the file. One wet stretch worth counting. The best single day was 4 August at the Swansea Channel Training Walls.

Squid

The calendar turns this month. Arrow squid and southern calamari go to peak, with snapper, salmon and trevally alongside them.

Four spots on the site hold squid, and they do not want the same thing. Wangi Wangi Point is weed. Belmont Wharf and Lee Wharf read best on the high. Swansea Channel is the odd one. It wants run rather than a particular point in the tide, so there it is the moving water that counts and not the top or the bottom.

And that is where my file stops. It does not know which weed bed. It does not know that the good one sits forty metres left of where you park. Anyone who has jigged the lake through a few springs is carrying things that will never be in a line of that log.

September

Does the water keep sliding, or does it settle under 18.2? Do the squid actually turn up in the log, or are peak season on a calendar and fish in the water two different things?

And is the bar in the right place now. If September comes back with twenty golden days I will have to move it again, and write that down too.

Send me the screenshots. They work better than I do.

I am going out to the jetty.