Enginefacts with dates — no fishability score, on purpose
Today's read
Can I fish for cod or haddock today?
Season state · loading the closure file…
Reading the rules…
The recreational seasons and every protection area load from
the closure file the moment the page opens; the state of today lands here.
Seasons, sizes, bags and closures change — verify against
NOAA/GARFO and MA DMF before you go. No fishability
verdict is offered anywhere on this page: preferences for this water are uncalibrated,
and the season banner governs regardless.
Verify before you fish. What is shown here was captured on the
date stated and re-checked by nobody since. This page never displays spawning predictions,
and it suppresses its own readings inside protection areas in season — including areas whose
closures legally exempt recreational rod-and-reel. The rule here is older than the exemption:
don't point people at spawning cod.
One chart, three facts. Observed bottom temperature (FIShBOT — the
fishing fleet's own sensors, gridded daily, sparse where nobody fished), seabed class from
USGS usSEABED point samples, and the closure state drawn as boundaries to avoid — never as
targets. No score is computed from any of it. When the signal dies the page replays the last
copy it truly fetched, stamped with when.
1 · The chart — bottom water, seabed, closuresobserved dots carry dates · red boundaries are avoidance, not structure
The grounds
gravel / rocky (≥30% gravel) · gravelly sand · sand / mud — usSEABED graded samples only; an empty cell is unsampled or suppressed by an area in force, not sand
protection area in force — readings suppressed inside, not a target · dotted grey = out of season now
FIShBOT 7-km cell, newest observed bottom temperature with its date
Zoom and pan live on the map; the layer button (top-right) switches the base
chart — Ocean bathymetry, OSM or NOAA's quilted ENC — and toggles this page's data layers,
seamarks and depth labels, same as the bluefin view. Hiding the protection-area boundaries
hides the drawing only: readings inside an area in force stay suppressed regardless.
Base chart Esri Ocean · GEBCO · NOAA. For planning only — not for navigation.
2 · Season & closurescaptured dates inside · verify before you go
Loading regulations…
Loading closures…
3 · The grounds, one by onesuppression first · then the observed facts
4 · Honest limitswhat this page refuses to guess
Bottom temperature is FIShBOT (Fishing Industry Shared Bottom Oceanographic
Timeseries — eMOLT, study fleet, CTDs; gridded 7 km daily) — observations, so a ground nobody
fished has no reading, and sparse is honest. Seabed is usSEABED point-sample averages via
Northeast Ocean Data / USGS — samples, not a mapped surface; cod like the hard stuff, haddock
the gravel-to-sand, and that substrate preference is still literature ([LIT]), not measured.
No fishability verdict is offered anywhere: the temperature legs below are now measured, but
a calibrated multi-factor model still does not exist, and this page will not pretend one does.
When a number appears here it is a measurement with a date, never a forecast. Expected bottom temperature is the duPontavice model
climatology (daily, 1/12°, 1959–2020) — the expected value for the date, not an observation;
where the product masks shallow water a ground reads from its nearest modeled cell and the
card says how far. The cod/haddock temperature bands are measured associations from
~3,600 Gulf of Maine survey tows (NEFSC bottom trawl, spring+fall 1963–2008, one gear era),
with each tow's bottom temperature sampled from the same duPontavice product — so bands and
expected temperatures live on one scale. Association is not preference: depth and temperature
covary, band edges move with the 50%-of-peak threshold, and a band is never a verdict.
Derivations: tools/derive-prefs.py, tools/derive-btclim.py; provenance inside both JSON files.
Closures & seasons: lib/closures.json, provenance inside; boundaries flagged approximate
follow the coast or the state-waters line — treat edges as fuzzy.