About tacklemap

What it is

A clean, fast plotter of fishing waypoints. Each spot has coordinates, an access note, the species typically caught there, and a type — reef, wreck, estuary, jetty, canyon, headland, and so on. Coverage starts in the most-fished regions of Australia and grows from there.

The thinking is simple: good fishing knowledge is scattered across forums, old guidebooks, charter brochures, club logbooks, and word-of-mouth at the boat ramp. tacklemap pulls it onto a single plotter you can scan in seconds, on whatever phone you happen to have on you.

What's on the map today

• An interactive map with thousands of waypoints across Australian coastal and inland waters, on a custom basemap styled for marine use rather than road driving.
• Waypoint pages with target species, access notes, a short write-up, and the spots nearby.
• Live conditions per waypoint — wind, swell, sea-surface temperature, air temperature, plus sun and moon times, and a direct link to the authoritative BOM tide table.
• Species pages with illustrations, regions, and the waypoints where each species is caught.
• User submissions. Sign in, click a coordinate on the map, and propose a new spot — or edit an existing one. Submissions go through a light review before publishing.
• Comments and abuse reporting on every waypoint, so the community can refine and self-police the data.
• Search across spots and species, plus region landing pages for the most-fished parts of the coast.
• Magic-link or Apple sign-in. No passwords, no friction.

Where it's headed

The flagship upcoming feature is community catch reports. The most useful thing a fishing site can tell you isn't “this spot exists” — it's “this is what's biting here right now.”

The plan: tap a species on a waypoint to log that you caught one. The waypoint surfaces a recency-weighted ranking of what people are actually pulling out — no raw counts, just rank order, so it stays honest. When one species pulls clearly ahead of the rest, it earns an “on the bite” badge. Old reports fade naturally, so the ranking reflects this fortnight, not last summer.

That feature opens the door to two bigger ones:

• Seasonality forecasts. Once we have a year or two of reports, we'll know when each species typically arrives at each spot — turning descriptive history into “$SPECIES is due to show up at $WAYPOINT in the next 2–3 weeks.”
• Spatial smoothing. A quiet waypoint next to a busy, well-reported one almost certainly holds similar fish. Activity at heavily-used spots will lend signal to their neighbours, so even cold-start waypoints surface useful information.

Beyond that: expansion to New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, richer search and filters, and listings for charter operators and tackle shops who actually know their patch.

The principle

The map and submitting reports stay free. Ad-supported, not subscription-walled. The community value of catch data depends on maximum participation — paywalling submissions would defeat the point.

If a paid tier appears later, it'll cover derived signal: push alerts when your watched spots light up, an export of your personal catch log, seasonality forecasts. The core experience stays open to anyone with a phone.

How it's built

Cloudflare's edge from front to back — Workers for the app, D1 for the database, KV for hot caches, R2 for tiles and images. No mobile app to install: it works in any browser, fast even on shaky reception at the ramp. The map basemap is custom-tiled and styled specifically for marine use, not borrowed from a road-driving basemap.

Coverage

Australia first — the project started here and that's where coverage is deepest. New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are next on the list. Once a country has enough waypoints on the map to be genuinely useful, it gets a proper landing page and dedicated search.

Contributing

If you know a public-access spot worth adding, submit it from the map. To flag inaccurate, unsafe, or sensitive information, use the report link on any waypoint — or email hello@pierswarmers.com directly.

Acknowledgements

The recreational angling community in Australia has been pooling waypoint knowledge for decades — through forums, club logbooks, charter operators, guidebooks, magazines, and plain word-of-mouth on the boat ramp. tacklemap is a compilation of that shared knowledge, tightened up onto a single plotter.

If a waypoint here came from your work and you'd like attribution — or removal — please get in touch.