Bite forecast in Ireland

Every morning the model rebuilds an hour-by-hour bite forecast for waters across the twenty-six counties — the Shannon and its lakes, Lough Corrib and Lough Derg, the limestone rivers of the midlands, and the Atlantic marks of the west coast. 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. Around the coast the tide is layered on top, because an Atlantic mark fishes to the tide and not to the clock.

Irish waters carry a mixed coarse and game head: pike and perch through the loughs, roach, rudd, bream, tench and carp on the slower water, brown trout and Atlantic salmon on the rivers, and eel almost everywhere. Off the coast the list changes completely — European seabass, cod, pollack, mackerel, plaice, conger, thornback ray, ballan wrasse and grey mullet. Each county page names the species the forecast covers for that water and the months they are in season.

Readings come in metric by default — °C and kilometres — and the switch in the header moves them to US units. The bite score is computed per county rather than per lough, so two waters in the same county share it; what is genuinely local is the solunar window, computed from the page's own coordinates, and the tide on a sea mark. The forecast runs 15 days out, and past about a week treat it as a way to pick a weekend rather than a schedule. We do not yet carry catch reports from Ireland, so these pages lean on the forecast and the species list rather than on other anglers' results — and we say so rather than showing an empty map.