9 Benefits of Using a Fishing Forecast App for Catching Bass

Any time you walk through a store that sells tackle, you see a nearly infinite aisle of new fishing gear you just “have” to buy. They all promise to increase your productivity and land your new personal best, but then, you buy all that stuff, and your results are mixed at best. 

That’s the story for practically everyone who fishes long-term. However, there’s one tool you can add to your repertoire and guarantee that you’ll increase your effectiveness. 

We’re talking about a fishing forecast app. 

A fishing forecast app can help you up your game dramatically in several different ways, and we’re going to go over why that is, along with what a forecast app is in the first place, in the following guide. 

What is a Fishing Forecast App? 

A fishing forecast app can have a lot of unique features, but the one thing that ties them all together is their focus on real-time weather patterns. Now, that might make you think that simply watching the news or paying attention to your normal weather app is more than enough to make a fishing forecast app obsolete, but that’s not the case. 

The information provided by a fishing forecast app is aimed at giving fishermen an advantage. The information provided goes well beyond just telling you the temperature and possible overcast. We’ll talk more about this later in the benefits section, but just know that when a fishing forecast app says it gives “complete” weather readouts, it means it. 

What Fishing Forecast App Should I Get? 

As we said earlier, there are a ton of different forecast apps available, and they all tend to have their own unique features. Because of that, not everything we list in this guide will be relevant for all the different forecast apps on the market. 

We recommend the BassForecast fishing app. It’s aimed specifically at bass anglers, and it provides all the features we’ll be talking about. If you go with another option, you might get a lackluster experience. 

What are the Benefits of Using a Fishing Forecast App? 

There are a ton of benefits to using a fishing forecast app such as BassForecast, and they don’t all have to do with the weather. In fact, weather readouts are only a small part of the BassForecast fishing app. 

Here’s everything you should expect to gain from hopping on board. 

1: Real-Time Weather Forecasts for Specific Fishing Spots

BassForecast has in-depth information for every waterway in the US. That includes coastal fishing opportunities. 

You can get real-time weather information for the spot you’re going to be fishing in. You’ll know the exact barometric pressure, air temperature, water temperature, and more that we’ll talk about later on as it is happening. 

Real-time forecasts are 100% necessary because they allow you to know exactly what is going on, and you can adjust your approach as needed. 

Simply watching the news the night before doesn’t give you anywhere near as much accurate information as a dedicated fishing forecast app does. 

2: In-Depth Results

We briefly touched on this, but the real-time information you get is not basic. You receive a full readout of any information that might be useful to an angler. This includes, but is not limited to, the following. 

• Air Temperature: This is the normal temperature reading you get from practically every news source, but it’s in real-time and changes every minute. 

• Water Temperature: This is the temperature of the water, and it’s a key piece of information you don’t get from other sources. This is important because the water temperature can be a lot lower than the air temperature, and a day that you might think is a great day to fish might be unproductive. With a forecast app, you can see this information up front and plan accordingly. 

• Barometric Pressure: This is another key piece of information that deals with how much pressure the atmosphere is putting on the Earth. This greatly impacts fish activity, and it’s a measurement that you either need special equipment to read yourself or a source such as a forecast app. 

• Moon Cycle: Moon cycles are also available. The phases of the moon affect the tides, and that greatly impacts your fishing capabilities. This is something you can track on your own with old-school methods, but it’s far better to have a reliable reading in the palm of your hand along with tons of other information. 

• Precipitation: This isn’t just important because of how it affects the fish. It’s important for your own safety, too. With real-time precipitation readings, you can get a heads up for when you need to head out, or you can tell that a little drizzle is going to ease up and you’ll have the whole lake to yourself since everyone else ran off.  

• Overcast: Of course, you’ll also get a real-time depiction of the overcast an area is experiencing. 

• Wind: This is useful for understanding how easy your fishing experience is going to be. Wind affects your casting ability, how choppy the water is, and more. It can be difficult when it’s extremely windy. So, this is a welcome bit of information even if it's not 100% crucial. 

3: Maps

If you’ve ever gone to a new lake without a map, you know how downright annoying it can be to try to navigate. Not only that, but you can easily end up getting a bit lost on the bigger lakes in the United States. 

Unfortunately, maps aren’t always easy to find for every lake, and even if you can find one, there are problems with basic physical maps and digital maps. Physical maps can be lost pretty easily on the water, and standard digital maps are just maps of the waterways. They don’t have fishing-specific information. 

The maps found in a fishing forecast app are designed to help fishermen. You’ll find highly detailed maps of the waterways and their banks, and you’ll see plenty of visual aids telling you where hazards are, the depth of the water at each spot, and more. 

These comprehensive fishing maps can keep you safe, help you navigate, and point you toward the spots you want to fish in without having to do in-depth sonar readings. That’s important because when you have to scan a lake for all that information, you spend more time scanning than you do actually fishing. Also, if you’re a bank fisherman trying to use a castable sonar unit, you’ll have to manually figure out all that information as you walk the banks. That can take several trips on its own. 

4: Specifies Lists

One of the most underrated features of a solid fishing forecast app is the list of fish species available for each area. Have you ever gone to a spot looking for a specific fish and then wondered why you’re not catching any? Well, they might not be in that body of water. Giant sturgeons are found in the Great Lakes, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find them in random ponds surrounding them. Just because largemouth bass is in a lake doesn’t mean you’ll find Smallies. The same concept applies to every other fish. 

When you have a list of the fish available in the water you’re fishing, you can plan your trip accordingly. 

You might even find out that some fish you didn’t know about are in some of your favorite spots, and if you want to take a short break from fighting bass, you can try something new. 

It’s also common for general population ratings to be provided. This can help because it can help you figure out which spots have the type of fish you’re targeting in spades and which ones might be a bit more challenging. 

5: Community Tips

Fishermen might be notorious for hiding their favorite spots from each other, but you’d be surprised how forthcoming they can be when they’re given an online platform to communicate through. A fishing forecast app lets users engage with the content in meaningful ways. This includes notes about specific spots and information that an app simply can’t gather via public sources. 

You can take advantage of this information to increase the productivity of your fishing trips and choose the right spots without having to worry too much about exploring an entire lake or multiple lakes in a limited amount of time. 

6: Community Engagement

You don’t have to just go through user-generated tips and notes. Many fishing forecast apps also provide active forums and chat services that can bring you into the greater fishing community with ease. 

This is good for a few reasons. 

First, you can swap tips and stories with other anglers in a way that the good old boat dock just doesn’t work for. This is great for picking up information. 

However, it’s also a good way to get a fishing buddy in an increasingly isolated world. Many people would love to sit down and talk about the sport, but as social relationships become harder to get, that age-old part of the fishing experience is withering a bit outside of competitions. A fishing app that has a community built-in can give you that old-school sense of friendship back, and what’s really cool about it is the other anglers don’t have to be from your own community. They can be from anywhere. It really broadens your fishing horizons. 

7: Lure Choice Guidance

Wouldn’t you love to pull up to a spot for once and know exactly what lures tend to be effective there? Well, many fishing apps provide that by using user-generated data to compile the most effective lures for the area into one easy-to-read recommendation chart for any occasion. 

This can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend flipping between lures and hoping to find what the fish want before it’s time to head home. 

If you have a varied tacklebox with plenty of goodies to use, this can be a major boon, because you likely have what’s listed as recommended, and you won’t have to cycle through even a fraction of all that stuff to get something that works. 

8: Increased Fishing Productivity

All these tips add up to one major benefit; you can increase how productive your fishing experience is. 

When you have a powerful tool in the palm of your hand that can tell you the exact weather conditions you’re in, what fish to expect, water depth, hazards, and more, you can easily land fish when you otherwise would have had to spend a lot of time just to catch your first fish of the day. Figuring out all that information manually, or otherwise winging it and hoping for the best, is extremely inefficient. 

Once you make the switch to a fishing forecast app, you’ll almost certainly catch more fish than you’re used to as long as you take the time to learn how to use the information provided. 

9: Better Time Management

Unless you’re retired or a professional, you probably have a limited amount of time to go fishing. You probably fight for every minute you can get whether that means being a weekend warrior or making special stops before and after work to get a little fishing in. 

A fishing forecast app naturally helps you make the most of that precious fishing time. 

As we said earlier, a fishing forecast app helps you increase your productivity. You already know what you need to know about a spot before you arrive, and you can "get to work" as soon as you pull up to the boat dock. You don’t have to worry about wasting time trying to figure things out or exploring the spot, and you can expect to quickly reel in some great bass. 

Even if you do enjoy a little more free time than the average fisherman, it’s always a bonus if you can spend more time reeling in fish than you do floating around and hoping for the best. 

If you want to up your game, stop wasting time, and catch more fish, download the BassForecast fishing app, today.