FishTrack - Fishing Charts

Review by eFreeware

Offshore fishing starts long before the boat leaves the dock. The difference between a wasted morning and a good one often comes down to reading water temperature, currents and weather, and doing that from a phone screen instead of a desktop is what this app is built for. FishTrack, from Surfline/Wavetrak, Inc., gathers sea surface temperature charts, satellite imagery and marine forecasts into a single map you can study before and during a trip.

The app is free to install, carries no ads, and offers in-app purchases. It has been on Google Play since August 2016 and sits at a 3.3 average from 362 ratings, with more than 100,000 installs. That rating is middling rather than glowing, which is worth keeping in mind as you weigh what the app promises against what anglers have made of it.

Reading water temperature and satellite imagery

The core of the app is its layered chart view. You get sea surface temperature imagery, which the developer offers free, along with chlorophyll and true color satellite views. Temperature breaks and color changes are the sorts of things offshore anglers watch for, and having them on a phone means you can check conditions from the dock or the truck rather than only at a desk.

Layers for currents, sea surface height and bathymetry can be turned on over that base. Each layer adds a different piece of the picture: bottom structure, how water is moving, and where it is stacking up. The developer pitches the whole thing as a way to burn less fuel and find fish faster, which is the kind of claim that depends on how well you read the layers rather than on the app doing the work for you.

The value is in the charts themselves rather than in any kind of sonar or live feed. What appeals to me here is the layering, since combining temperature with currents and bottom contours in one view is more useful than flipping between separate sources.

Planning a trip with routes and waypoints

Trip planning gets its own set of tools. You can drop waypoints to mark fishing spots and catches, so productive areas stay on the map for next time, and build routes to lay out a run. The app shows distances and headings for those routes, which is the practical arithmetic of an offshore day: how far out you are going and in which direction.

Planning also covers tides, solunar tables and marine forecasts. Forecasts cover the obvious safety question of whether the day is fishable, while tide and solunar information speaks to the timing question of when fish are likely to be active. Put together, the route tools and the forecast layers cover the two decisions that shape most offshore trips: where to go and when to leave.

For anyone who runs a boat regularly, saving waypoints over a season builds a personal record of spots that produced. That is a modest feature, but it is the sort of thing that becomes more useful the longer you use it.

Offline charts and location

Offshore is exactly where phone signal tends to disappear, and the app addresses that directly. You can save fishing chart imagery for offline use, so the maps you need are available without a connection, and the app shows your current location both online and offline.

That combination matters more than it might sound. A chart you cannot load once you are past the last cell tower is not much help, and a position marker that only works with a signal is worse. Saving imagery ahead of a trip is the step that makes the rest of the app usable out on the water, and it is worth treating as part of the routine rather than an afterthought.

The offline saving applies to the chart imagery you choose to keep, so the practical approach is to decide which areas you will fish and store those before heading out.

What you need before you start

You install the app, and the charts, layers, forecasts and planning tools are the app itself. The developer offers free sea surface temperature charts as the entry point, with additional features available through in-app purchases.

The app is free to download and shows no ads, so the decision to spend anything comes down to whether the paid options are worth it to you. The developer invites feedback through the app and offers an email address for reaching customer service directly, which suggests an active line to the people maintaining it.

The most recent update, from July 2026, is a maintenance release: bug fixes and minor interface improvements. Nothing in it changes what the app does, but it does indicate the app is still being worked on rather than left alone.

Who gets the most from FishTrack

This is a tool for saltwater anglers who plan offshore trips and want to make those plans around water conditions. If you already think in terms of temperature breaks, current edges and bottom structure, the layered chart view gives you those in one place, and the route and waypoint tools turn that reading into an actual plan.

It also suits boat owners who want a record of where they have fished and how far they are running. The distance and heading figures for routes speak directly to fuel and time, and saved waypoints accumulate into something useful over a season.

Anglers who fish from shore or in small inland waters will find little here, since the app is built around satellite ocean imagery and marine forecasts. The 3.3 average from 362 ratings suggests a fair number of users have found room for improvement, so it is worth going in with realistic expectations rather than assuming the charts will do the finding for you.

A planning tool for offshore anglers

FishTrack is a free, ad-free app that puts satellite sea surface temperature charts, chlorophyll and true color imagery, bathymetry, currents and sea surface height into one layered map, then adds forecasts, tides, solunar tables, waypoints, routes and offline chart saving on top.

The caveats are straightforward. The app leans on satellite imagery and forecasts, so its usefulness depends on your ability to read those layers, and the middling rating from a few hundred users is a signal that not everyone has been satisfied. In-app purchases exist alongside the free charts, and the recent update is maintenance rather than anything new.

If you run a boat offshore and want your trip planning in one place on your phone, with the option to keep charts available when the signal drops, this is worth installing and trying against your own fishing grounds. If your fishing happens close to shore or in freshwater, the app's focus on ocean satellite data means it will not have much to offer you.

What's new in version 1.5.1

Thanks for using FishTrack – this update fixes a few bugs and some minor UI improvements.