Courtesy of Mike Mehlmann
The BassForecast app is meant to help amateur anglers determine the best days to fish.
This past weekend, anglers from around the world converged on Fort Worth and Lake Ray Roberts to fish bass and compete for the Bassmaster Classic trophy and a $300,000 prize. While local amateur anglers may never have the chance to compete for that large a sum, there is an app on the market that's meant to help improve their fishing experience.
Arlington-based company BassForecast, led by co-founder Mike Mehlmann, says he spent over 3,000 hours of engineering time creating the BassForecast app. The idea for the app was conceived in late 2015 — Mehlmann saw a gap in the market for a species-specific fishing forecast that would take into account the delay between air temperature and water temperature. After hours of research and software development, the app was launched in 2017. The initial goal for the app was to allow hobby anglers to see the best day in the upcoming 10 to fish.
“Knowing which weekend to fish is going to give [the anglers] better odds and will usually double their good experiences over a year. You know, they're not going to have a great experience every time. But if they had two out of 10 good experiences last year, we can take them to four out of 10,” Mehlmann says.
BassForecast’s ratings system allows anglers to choose the most desirable day to fish, giving them recommendations to help them prepare the best times, baits, and presentations.
After simply typing in the fishing location (typically the nearest ZIP code), BassForecast provides each day in the upcoming 10 with a rating from Tough (1) to Epic (10). From a possible 6,000 combinations of location, weather, barometric pressure, fish mood, bait, and more, anglers are given the top recommendations for what day and time to fish, along with added features like what baits or presentations to use.
“What we're trying to do is help the average angler kind of whittle [the combinations] down and say, ‘Hey, out of these 6,000 possibilities, what are the four or five most likely, for today, and tomorrow, and 10 days from now,’” Mehlmann says.
On a “Good” or “Epic” day, catch rates could be 68% to 305% above average. Fishing on those days helps anglers catch more fish consistently — and customers are stoked. The app currently sports close to 9,000 positive reviews on Apple's App Store. Amateur anglers aren’t the only happy customers, however. BassForecast is tournament-compliant with the Bassmaster Classic, and well-known anglers like Alton Jones Jr. and Tyler Anderson are supporters of the app.
Mehlmann isn’t stopping now, though. He and his team are currently planning for new features, involving fishing pressure and more detailed weather charts and graphs.
“We're going to have a feature in the app in the future, where you could adjust for, ‘Are you fishing a lake that's really crowded or had a lot of fishing pressure that day? Or are you fishing a lake that's quiet or fishing on a weekday on a public lake where there hasn't been a lot of pressure?’” Mehlmann says.
BassForecast is available on Apple's App Store and Google Play. Learn more about the app at bassforecast.com.
