SpearFactor
Pick a spot or a species. Get the best multi-day window — water temp, tides, moonlight, behavior, all factored in.
The SpearFactor Fishing Trip Optimizer helps spearfishers and freedivers pick the best multi-day window for a trip anywhere in the world. Give it a coastline or a target species and a date range, and it ranks every possible block of consecutive days by the conditions that actually matter — tidal movement, moonlight, water temperature, and species behavior — so you travel on the days most likely to fish well. It covers 325+ dive destinations and 138 species using free, science-grade data: NOAA tides in the US, the EOT20 global tide model everywhere else, Open-Meteo weather and sea-surface temperature, and local astronomy for sun and moon.
The best window depends on your spot and your target species, but the biggest drivers are tide movement, moon phase, and water temperature. Moving water and moderate tidal range usually turn fish on, while big spring tides can hurt visibility; darker moons help some species and bright moons help others. The SpearFactor Trip Optimizer scores every multi-day window in your date range against these factors so you can see the strongest days at a glance instead of guessing.
Tides drive current, which moves bait and triggers feeding — most species are more active on moving water than during slack tide. The moon controls both tide size (large spring tides near the new and full moon) and nighttime light, which affects how and when fish feed. The Trip Optimizer combines daytime tidal range with a moonlight index, then adjusts for your chosen species' known tide and moon preferences to rank each window.
Pick your destination (or a species) and the range of dates you could travel, choose your trip length and dive depth, and the optimizer returns the best consecutive-day windows ranked by combined conditions. Each result shows the tide, moon, and water-temperature picture for that block so you can book travel around the days most likely to fish. Always confirm with local intel, recent reports, and on-the-ground conditions before you dive.
Once your dates are set, check SpearFactor Conditions for real-time dive visibility, water temperature, swell, tide, wind, and species fish scores across 30+ California dive spots. The Trip Optimizer picks the best window weeks out; the Conditions tool confirms whether the water is actually diveable the day you go.