Bite forecast in Canada

Every morning the model rebuilds an hour-by-hour bite forecast for waters across all thirteen provinces and territories — the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes shoreline, the shield lakes of Ontario and Manitoba, the Mackenzie system, and the Pacific coast of British Columbia. It reads air and water temperature, barometric pressure and the direction it is moving, wind, cloud cover and the season each species is in, then folds in the solunar windows around moonrise, moonset and the moon's transit. On the coast the tide is layered on top, which is what a returning salmon is actually keeping time by.

The reports behind the forecast look nothing like the American ones a border away. No single species dominates: smallmouth bass, northern pike and yellow perch sit within a few reports of each other, and the Pacific salmon run — pink, king, coho and sockeye — is as large as any of them. Rainbow trout, largemouth bass and walleye fill out the list. Ontario and British Columbia send by far the most reports, then Quebec, Nova Scotia, Alberta and Manitoba, and every province page carries its own catch map and month-by-month activity.

Readings come in metric by default — °C, kilometres, hPa — and the switch in the header moves them to US units. The bite score is computed per region rather than per lake, and Canadian regions are enormous: a score for Ontario is a regional signal, not a reading of the lake in front of you. What is genuinely local is the solunar window, computed from the page's own coordinates, and the tide on the coast. The forecast runs 15 days out, and past about a week treat it as a way to pick a weekend rather than a schedule.