Every angler knows the feeling — you leave the dock at 5am, run 40 miles on a gut feeling, find nothing, run another 20, find nothing, and by the time you’re on fish it’s 2pm and you’ve burned most of your day and half your fuel. The ocean is big. Good information is everything.
That’s what I actually wanted to solve. Not just a fishing blog — a machine learning model that could tell me where the fish would be before I left the dock.
Why I Built This
I’m Kenny — a Southern California angler with 20+ years on these waters and a day job in software engineering. I’ve spent enough mornings running to the wrong spot while the bite was happening somewhere else. Eventually I started pulling NOAA satellite data myself and building the tools I wished existed.
The data was always there. Sea surface temperature, chlorophyll concentrations, AIS vessel tracking, historical fish counts — NOAA satellites capture all of it every day. But it was either locked behind $30/month subscriptions (SatFish, RipCharts, FishTrack) or buried in government portals that weren’t built for fishermen standing on a dock at 4am.
So I built my own. What started as personal SST and chlorophyll maps grew into a full platform — animated 14-day satellite overlays, a live San Diego sport fishing fleet tracker, daily fish count data, and the AI predictions page, which is the live version of that original machine learning model. Feed it SST breaks, chlorophyll patterns, fleet behavior, and historical catch data — and it starts to answer the question: given conditions today, where should I be tomorrow?
What the Maps Show You
Fish don’t read fishing reports. They follow the water. Yellowtail stack up on temperature breaks. Bluefin cruise warm blue water offshore. Dorado hang current edges where bait concentrates. When you can see those patterns from space, you’re not guessing anymore.
- Sea Surface Temperature (SST) — 14-day animated overlays covering SoCal and Baja. Find the temperature breaks where gamefish hunt.
- Chlorophyll Maps — Locate the bait concentrations and you’ll find the predators stacked behind them.
- Fleet Tracker — Live AIS tracking of the San Diego sport fishing fleet. See where the boats are fishing right now.
- Fish Counts — Daily landings data from SoCal sport boats. What’s actually getting caught, and where.
- AI Bite Predictions — The ML model in action. Data-driven forecasts for SoCal waters, improving as more data comes in.
We cover Southern California down through Baja and the Sea of Cortez — some of the best pelagic fishing grounds in the world.
About the Gear Guides
The articles on this site come from two decades of personal experience — party boats out of San Diego, overnight runs to the Coronado Islands and offshore banks, and more Baja trips than I can count chasing yellowtail and tuna. When I recommend a specific reel, rod, or jig, it’s because that’s what’s held up on the water for me, not because of a spec sheet.
I fish with my daughter now too, which has a way of making you want to write things down and get them right.
Everything Here Is Free
The SST maps, chlorophyll maps, fleet tracker, fish counts, AI predictions — all free. That won’t change. Commercial fishermen have used satellite oceanography for decades. Recreational anglers deserve the same edge.
Some gear links on this site are affiliate links (mostly Amazon). That’s how the server bills get paid. It doesn’t affect what I recommend — I’d rather link nothing than point someone toward the wrong reel for a bluefin fight.
Have feedback, a question, or a report from the water? Drop me a line.
Tight lines,
Kenny