SST, chlorophyll & AIS FAQ

Sea surface temperature is the satellite's read of the top millimeter of ocean. Pelagics — bluefin, yellowfin, yellowtail, dorado, marlin — track specific temperature bands. Where two water masses collide, you get a break: a sharp, narrow line of color change on the chart. Bait stacks on the warm-water side; predators hunt the seam. Find the break, find the fish.

Look for a color transition that's tight, not gradual. A break that goes from 64° to 70° in half a mile is far more productive than one that fades over ten miles. Our contour lines (no other app draws them) trace each isotherm — so you can see exactly where the 68° line runs and how it bends around structure.

Depends on species and season. Rough SoCal numbers: bluefin 62–72°F, yellowfin 70–82°F, yellowtail 62–68°F, dorado 75°F+, marlin 75–82°F. The chart's color scale shows the local range — look for breaks within your target's band, not outside it.

1-day = sharpest detail but has cloud gaps. Use it to find live, sharp breaks. 3-day fills in clouds with a slight smooth. 7-day shows you how breaks moved across the week — great for spotting persistent structure that's likely to still be there tomorrow. Stack all three and watch a break stay (or drift) over the week.

Chlorophyll-a is the satellite's read of plankton density. More plankton = more bait = more predators. Blue water is clean and low-productivity; green water is rich. The edge between the two — the green-to-blue color line — is where bait piles up. Like an SST break, but for the food side of the equation. The sweet spot is where an SST break and a chlorophyll edge line up.

AIS is a transponder system that broadcasts every commercial and most large recreational vessels' position, speed, and course. We pull live AIS plus a global secondary feed and show every boat in your viewport — by name, color-coded by speed, with a 72-hour trail. If a fleet is on a spot right now, you'll see it.

Three big tells: (1) Slow-speed clusters — multiple boats holding under 2 knots in a tight area means they're drifting bait or anchored on a school. (2) Tight 180°+ turns — usually a hookup, working a bait ball, or chasing a school. (3) Same boat returning to the same coordinates over multiple days — that's a captain who knows the spot is producing.

Scrub backwards through the last three days. Watch how the fleet drifted. Where did boats spend the most time? Where did clusters form at sunset and break up at sunrise? That tells you where bait was holding overnight — and bait that held last night is usually still close enough to be worth a look this morning.

Yes. Build a custom watch list of up to 50 vessels — your competition, your favorite captains, the boats you trust. Notification rings tell you the moment one of your watch boats stops or starts a tight turn. You'll know they hooked up before they post about it.

1) Pull the latest 1-day SST and look for sharp breaks in your target species' temperature band. 2) Switch to chlorophyll — find the green-to-blue edges that line up with the SST breaks. 3) Open AIS playback and check where the working fleet ended up at sunset. 4) Cross-reference with the 7-day playback to confirm the break has been holding, not just a one-day artifact. 5) Drop a primary waypoint, then two backups in case the bite has moved. 6) Save your route. You leave the dock at 4 a.m. knowing exactly where to start.

Switch to the 3-day or 7-day composite — those fill in cloud gaps with averaged data. Cross-reference with live NDBC buoy temps as ground truth. And remember: AIS works through any weather. If the fleet's been drifting in the same area for 24 hours, the chart can be cloudy and you still know where to fish.

Marine fuel is $5–7 a gallon. A typical SoCal trip burns 30–40 gallons round trip — call it $200 minimum. When you guess wrong on where the bite is and have to run a second leg, that's another 10–15 gallons, another hour off the bite, and another $50–100 out the door. Catalysst US is $9.99 a month — about $120 a year. One saved leg of running, on one trip, pays for the entire annual subscription with $80 left over. Two trips a month break even before you ever pull the trigger on the credit card. The bigger value isn't the gas: arriving at the right spot 30–60 minutes earlier means you fish the dawn bite — when most pelagics feed — instead of running through it. That's the fish you've been missing.

Run the math against your last 12 trips. How many spent 1+ hours running between spots looking for the bite? At 15 gallons of fuel and $5–7/gal, each one of those wasted hours cost more than the entire annual Catalysst subscription. You don't have to fix every trip. Fix one trip a month and you're still ahead by 10×. Fix two and the only remaining question is whether you also count your time on the water as worth something — because that's where the real value compounds.

SST and chlorophyll charts refresh every 3 hours, around the clock. AIS vessel positions update every 30 seconds for live boats. NDBC buoy temps update every 30 minutes. Trail playback covers the last 72 hours. SST/CHL playback covers the last 7 days.

All of it is original, gathered first-hand from a stack of independent sources we run ourselves. We pull live AIS vessel data to see exactly where the working fleet is fishing. We track spotter-plane activity to catch where the pros are searching from the air. We monitor every public fish report in the region — sportboat landing counts and social media — and fold in reports submitted directly by our own users out on the water. We listen to VHF and 2-meter radio chatter. We even run our own AIS receiving station for coverage other tools don't have. And on top of all of it, we fish — the team is on the same water you are, ground-truthing every layer against what's actually biting. That blend of satellite, AIS, air, radio, the fleet, and our own lines in the water is what makes the picture ours.