Grounded in official gauge data and each river's own long-term record — honest about
the weather, and honest when it doesn't know.
It never invents data
Where a water has no calibrated flow history, it shows the live reading only and says so,
rather than guessing a rating.
It's honest about weather
A perfect flow on a snowing, gale-blown day is reported as a hard day — not "get out there".
It always takes the worse of the two.
It keeps working when a gauge doesn't
If a regional council's data portal goes down, the water's page doesn't blank out. You get a
plain "gauge unavailable" card, and the weather, access map, safety and rules — none of which
depend on the gauge — carry on as normal.
The rules are the official rules
Transcribed verbatim from the Fish & Game Anglers Notice, date-gated to switch seasons
automatically, with the official notice named as the sole legal authority.
The hatch models know their season
The predictive models only appear when the insect is actually about — cicada from November to
March, willow grub from December to March. No cicada advice on a warm spring morning.
Colour is never the only signal
Every rating pairs its traffic-light colour with an icon and words, so it reads for
colour-blind anglers.
It respects the taonga
Mātaitai reserve and native-fish content is sourced from rūnanga-sanctioned and DOC material,
and is never paywalled.
The science is real
The cicada temperature model and willow-grub degree-day model were built on published New
Zealand entomology.
