FishLeague

First cast

Getting Started

FishLeague is a competitive fishing league in your pocket: photograph your catch with a measuring device in frame, and the app GPS-verifies it, a moderator approves it, and you climb a live leaderboard.

Create an account with email, Apple Sign-In, or Google Sign-In. Every new account starts on the Free plan — no card required to fish. A short walkthrough introduces the app on first launch, and the home screen shows a Getting Started checklist with the four moves that make the app click:

• Set up your profile — username, photo, home state, favorite techniques.
• Join a tournament — there's always something open to enter.
• Submit your first catch — the whole flow takes under a minute.
• Follow an angler — build your Following feed.

Finding your way around

Basecamp

The Home Screen

Home is a live feed of every approved catch across every tournament, newest first, with infinite scroll. Two tabs at the top switch between All Catches and Following (just the anglers you follow). Each card shows the photo, length, species, and a tournament pill you can tap to jump straight to that event.

The main event

Submitting a Catch

Land the fish first. The whole flow is built to work with wet hands and a fish on the deck.

1. 1

   Tap the gold + button

   The camera opens immediately — no menus. You can also upload from your camera roll, though some tournaments require a live camera photo.

2. 2

   Shoot your catch on the measuring device

   Mouth closed, tail pinched, ruler or bump board readable in frame. A guide overlay shows exactly how to position the fish. The moment you shoot, AI species identification starts working in the background.

3. 3

   Pick the tournament

   Every open tournament you can enter is listed with its scoring method in plain English, time remaining, and an Entered or Entry Required badge. If only one tournament is eligible, this step skips itself.

4. 4

   Enter the length

   Type the inches you read off the measuring device — the photo stays on screen for reference. On supported phones (LiDAR iPhones and depth-capable Androids), tap AR Measure to measure the fish by tapping mouth and tail in augmented reality.

5. 5

   Confirm the species

   AI suggestions appear as chips with a confidence percentage — a confident match is pre-selected. Tap "None of these" to pick manually.

6. 6

   Add the details the format needs

   Weight for heaviest-fish boards, depth for depth-based formats, and — optionally — the lure, bait, and technique that fooled it. Logged gear feeds your personal analytics later.

7. 7

   Confirm location and submit

   Your GPS pin drops automatically (you can nudge it up to 200 m). The app warns you before you submit if the photo looks hard to judge or the fish is under the legal minimum for your state.

8. 8

   No signal? No problem

   Offline submissions queue on your phone and upload automatically when you reconnect. The photo is also saved to your camera roll (you can turn this off in settings), so you always keep your own copy.

What happens next

Every catch is reviewed by a human moderator, backed by automatic fairness checks — species match, length plausibility read from the measuring device, duplicate-photo detection, photo age, and GPS bounds. You'll get a push notification and email the moment a decision lands.

Compete

Tournaments

The Tournaments tab shows what you're fishing now and a Discover list of everything open — free and paid, local and national, individual and team. Tournament pages carry a live countdown, the day's weather, the feed, and everything below. On the web, browse at fishleague.app/tournaments.

The board

Scoring & Leaderboards

Every tournament picks one of seven scoring formats. The submission flow only asks for what the format actually needs.

Leaderboards update live the moment a catch is approved — no refresh needed. Your own row is highlighted in gold, ties show as T1/T2, and expanding a row shows the catch behind the score. The leaderboard can also tell you exactly what score you'd need to crack the top 3 or take the lead, based on time remaining.

Some events grant a handicap — newer anglers get a small multiplier so a fair fight doesn't require ten seasons of experience. Directors can also issue penalties (late weigh-in, short fish) that show transparently on the board.

Your logbook

My Catches & Catch-and-Release

My Catches is every catch you've ever submitted — any status, any tournament, newest first. Find it at Profile›Catches›View All on mobile, or at fishleague.app/catches on the web. Rejected catches show the moderator's note, and every row offers Edit species & gear.

Each of your catches carries a Released toggle. Forgot to mark a fish released when you submitted? Flip it any time — even after the tournament closed. Releasing never affects your leaderboard position; it earns a small XP bonus, counts toward conservation badges, and feeds your release-rate stats on the Conservation page.

The dock talk

Social & Community

Level up

XP, Badges & Challenges

Almost everything you do earns XP — submitting, getting approved, releasing fish, uploading your license. XP carries you through four levels: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum. Tap "How points work" anywhere it appears for the current point values, straight from the server.

Fish smarter

Fishing Intelligence

FishLeague's edge: every verified catch makes the whole platform smarter about where, when, and how fish get caught.

Run the show

For Tournament Directors

Anyone can run a tournament. Tap the gold + on the Tournaments tab: on the Free plan you can spin up a private event for your crew in about a minute; paid director plans unlock longer events, public listings, entry fees, and the full creation wizard — boundaries drawn on a map, team modes, live-photo enforcement, age limits, and more. You can also request to direct an existing event from Profile›Tournament Director.

Squad up

Teams, Clubs & Series

Build on it

Data API

Some plans include programmatic access to FishLeague’s fishing data — state regulations, conservation statistics, and which species are around a given spot this month. If your plan includes it, you can create a key yourself and start calling in a couple of minutes.

The API lives at data.fishleague.app, separate from the app itself. It is versioned, key-authenticated, and self-documenting: the full interactive reference is at data.fishleague.app/docs, generated from the service itself, so it can never drift from what the endpoints actually do. Whether your plan includes API access is shown in the feature table on fishleague.app/pricing.

Getting a key

1. 1

   Open API Keys

   Web›Sidebar›API Keys — or go straight to fishleague.app/api-keys. The page tells you whether your current plan includes access.

2. 2

   Create one, and copy it immediately

   Give it a name you'll recognise later — production, my dashboard. The key is shown once: only a fingerprint of it is stored, so nobody (including us) can show it to you again. Lose it and you revoke it and make another. You can hold up to five at a time, which is what lets you rotate without downtime — create the new one, move over, delete the old.

3. 3

   Send it as a header

   Every request carries x-api-key: your-key. Every route lives under /v1.

What you can read

Three conventions that will trip you up

• Units are not normalised, on purpose. Regulation sizes are in inches; catch lengths are in centimetres. That mirrors how each is stored, and silently converting one is how a size limit ends up wrong by a factor of 2.54.
• Null means “not measured”, never zero. Count-format tournaments record no length at all, so avg_length_cm: null beside total_catches: 6 is a species caught six times and measured zero times — not a species of zero-length fish.
• Every statistic carries an evidence block — how many records it came from, and whether that's strong, moderate or weak. A release rate from six catches is true and meaningless, and the value alone can't tell you which you're looking at.

Reading species likelihood honestly

This one is easy to over-read, so the response says what it means in the payload itself. The score is relative abundance — of the fish recorded around that spot in that month, what share were this species. It is not a probability of catching one. Occurrence records measure people looking, not fish, so the maths divides by all-fish records in the same place and month to cancel that out — but popular, shore-accessible water is still over-represented. Each result also carries a coverage field: a location nobody has ingested yet says so plainly rather than returning an empty list that reads like “no fish here”.

Your rules

Account & Settings

The gear icon on your profile opens settings. Highlights:

• Notifications — separate toggles for approvals, rejections, final-hour alerts, morning briefings, and Wrapped.
• Private account — one switch. Private profiles show only your name and avatar; followers you approve see everything.
• Save Catch Photos — keep a copy of every submission in your camera roll (on by default).
• Plans — compare tiers in-app; full details at fishleague.app/pricing. Free covers competing end to end; paid tiers add director tools, analytics depth, and more.
• Your data — export everything you've ever submitted with one tap (mobile settings or web profile), change email or password, or delete your account entirely.
• Report & block — on any profile via the … menu. Reports go to human review.

Good to know

• Lengths are entered in inches — read them right off the mat or board in your photo.
• Count-format catches don't need measuring — the fish either counts or it doesn't, so no length shows on those.
• Releasing never costs you rank. The Released flag feeds conservation stats and XP, not scoring.
• Photos are private by default — served securely, never from a public bucket, and GPS is rounded before anything is shown publicly.
• Every photo is one catch. Duplicate photos are detected automatically — shoot fresh every time.
• Private tournaments stay private — their names are masked everywhere non-members might see them.
• The web app is a full companion — leaderboards, feeds, profiles, My Catches, messages, regulations, and species guides, right here at fishleague.app.