Twice a month, around the new and full moon, the tide runs further than usual. Further out, and later, further in. Spring tides.
For a shore angler that isn’t trivia. A spring low opens ground you cannot otherwise stand on, exposes structure you normally only guess at, and concentrates fish into water that has nowhere else to go.
And your notes probably already know which of your marks it helps and which it ruins — you just haven’t been able to ask them.
What actually changes
A big low does three things at once.
It opens access. Ledges, reef, the back of a gully — ground that’s underwater at neaps becomes a place you can cast from for an hour either side of the bottom. Marks that only exist on spring lows are often the least-fished ground on the whole coast.
It concentrates fish. Water draining off shallow reef has to go somewhere. Gullies and channels that are one feature among many at high water become the only deep water for a hundred metres. Fish stack into them, and they don’t spread out again until the flood.
It moves more water, faster. A spring tide shifts more volume in the same six hours, so the run is harder. More food dislodged, more scent moving, and a stronger current for fish to sit behind. That’s sometimes exactly what switches a mark on — and sometimes what makes it unfishable, because your bait won’t hold.
That last one is why “spring lows are good” is not advice. It’s a coin toss until you know which of those effects dominates at *your* mark.
Why your own record is the only honest answer
Two gullies a kilometre apart can respond to the same spring low in opposite directions.
One drains into a deep channel and becomes a funnel — fish pile in, an hour either side of low is the best of the month. The other empties almost completely, and at spring low there’s simply not enough water left to hold anything. Same tide, same day, same coast.
No general rule distinguishes them. No solunar table knows. What distinguishes them is twenty logged trips at each, with the tide state recorded and — crucially — the blanks recorded too.
What the app is actually doing with it
BitePattern doesn’t store “spring low” as a label. It stores the underlying quantities, at the exact time and position you were standing:
- how far through the tide cycle you were, and which way it was running
- how many hours to the next high and the next low
- the moon phase and illumination, which is what drives the spring-neap cycle in the first place
Because moon phase and tide phase are both recorded per trip and per individual fish, the engine can separate things that feel identical in memory. A fish an hour before low on a spring is a different event from a fish an hour before low on a neap, and the record knows the difference even when you don’t.
That’s also why it can say something as specific as *”your kob came in the last hour before high”* rather than *”you do well on the tide.”*
The honest caveat
This only becomes personal once there’s enough of your own history behind it.
Under three logged trips the app gives textbook guidance and labels it as textbook — at that point “spring lows can be good” is all anyone can truthfully say to you. From three it starts showing you your own nearest matching days. At fifteen it re-weights itself around what actually matters at your marks, and a genuine spring-low pattern — if you have one — starts showing up on its own.
A moon cycle is roughly a month. Two spring sequences a month. Fifteen trips is a season, not a fortnight. There’s no shortcut, and anything that claims otherwise is guessing on your behalf.
What to do with this
Fish the spring lows you can fish safely, and log every one of them, including the blanks. A spring low that produced nothing at a mark is one of the more valuable records you can hold, because it’s the one that stops you driving out there next month for the same result.
Then let the record tell you which of your gullies is a funnel and which is a puddle. You’ll probably find you half-knew already.
⚠ One thing that is not a matter of preference: a big low tempts you onto ground that the flood will take back, sometimes faster than you can walk off it. Know your exit before you go out, and never let the app’s opinion of the fishing override your own eyes on the water.