The Trip You Swore You'd Remember
You had a +++++ day on the lake in October — largemouth hitting topwater through mid-morning, Annette pulling crappie off a brush pile with a 1/16 oz jig, water temp sitting at 62°F, SW wind at 8 mph, waning gibbous moon. Five weeks later you're back at the same spot on what looks like an identical overcast morning and you get nothing. Wind is NE now. Water is 54°F. Moon phase is waxing gibbous. Solunar is two stars instead of five.
You didn't write anything down the first time. You remembered the fish. You forgot everything that actually explained the fish.
What the Solunar Data Is Actually Doing
John Alden Knight's solunar theory holds that fish feeding activity peaks during major and minor periods defined by the moon's gravitational position relative to the angler's location. Every serious freshwater angler has an opinion on it — skeptics, believers, and pragmatists who log it regardless and let the data speak. The rating field here runs from one to six stars: one is dead water, six is a major period at peak moon. Log it every trip without judgment and after two seasons you will have a correlation table that either confirms or buries the theory against your specific bodies of water.
Moon Rise, Moon Set, Sun Rise, and Sun Set are stored as free text because times vary daily and the template needs exact values, not a dropdown approximation. These four fields are the reason you can reconstruct, eighteen months later, whether a +++++-rated morning actually had you on the water during a major period or whether you launched at 5:30 AM and the major window didn't open until 9:15 when you were already back at the ramp. The timing context is everything. Without it the solunar rating is just a number.
The Trip Rating field — +, ++, +++, ++++, +++++ — is deliberately separate from catch count. A trip where Mel catches twelve bluegill on a slow solunar day might be a ++ against a day where Andy Short pulls two largemouth during a major period that theoretically should have produced ten. Those are different kinds of information and they need different fields.
Splitting the Party
Total's Per Fisherman is a free-text field, not a calculated field. That's intentional. When Mel, Annette, and Andy Short are all on the same outing, the breakdown might be "Mel: 8, Annette: 5, Andy: 3" — but it might also be "Mel: 8 (6 LMB, 2 BG), Annette: 5 crappie, Andy: 3 BG" depending on how the day went. A structured field forces a schema; the free-text field accepts whatever shorthand you develop. Total Fish Caught is the sum, the free-text field is the forensics.
Target Species versus Species Caught is the gap that exposes productive bycatch patterns. You went for largemouth. You caught stripers. On a SW wind, waxing gibbous, 58°F water, Sound water type. Once you have thirty entries with that divergence noted, you start seeing which conditions redirect effort and which ones produce the target. Without the separation you'd just log "caught stripers" with no record of the original intent.
Reading the Wind Before You Launch
The morning before a session, you check the solunar table, you note moon phase, you pull sunrise and moonrise times for your GPS coordinates, and you check the forecast for wind direction and speed. None of that takes more than four minutes. You enter it all before you launch — Date, Start Time, Water Type, Co-ordinates pinned, Weather, Air Temp, Wind Speed and Direction. The water temperature goes in when the fish finder confirms it at the first stop.
On a 38°F January morning with ice forming at the north end of the lake and a NW wind at 14 mph pushing chop into the structure, you're not sitting at the ramp typing careful notes. You're filling in the dropdown fields with one thumb and moving. The multichoice architecture for weather, wind direction, moon phase, and solunar rating makes that possible — tap, tap, tap, launch.
The Bait and Method fields stay free text because terminal tackle selection varies too much for a dropdown to capture usefully. "1/4 oz chartreuse spinnerbait, slow roll" is not the same as "1/4 oz white spinnerbait, burn and kill" even though both are spinnerbaits in the same weight class. The exact presentation detail is what correlates with the fish.