HatchMatch River Desk turns four honest observations — month, water temperature, clarity and sky — into a ranked emergence list, matched life stages, a tippet formula and a day box you can actually carry to the river. No account, no signal, no guessing.
The bench is the home screen. Pick a water pack, then tap through four condition bands — month, temperature, clarity, sky. Every tap re-scores all fourteen hatch profiles instantly and re-orders the emergence list, with a confidence bar and a plain-language cue on each card.
Six month bands (early spring through winter), four temperature bands, three clarity states and three sky states. Bands are honest about what an angler can actually judge standing on a gravel bar.
Each profile starts from a base score, then gains or loses weight for month, temperature, clarity, sky and whether the insect belongs to the pack you are fishing. Long shots below the cut-off drop out instead of padding the list.
The bench does not just name a bug — it proposes the stage to fish right now. Low light leans spinner, cold water leans nymph, bright caddis days lean adult dun, and everything else defaults to the emerger in the film.
A water pack is a small, opinionated preset: water type, region character, default conditions and a stand-here coaching sentence. Switching packs re-frames the whole desk — the bench, the atlas cross-references and the calendar all follow the water you chose.
| Water pack | Water type | Character | Where to stand |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spring-creek evening spinner | Spring creek | Slow glassy glides, evening spinner falls over weed beds | Downstream of weed lanes, cast up-quartering into foam tongues |
| Freestone midday caddis | Freestone river | Boulder-broken runs, caddis skittering off riffles | Soft inside edges of riffles, short leader for control |
| Winter tailwater midge | Tailwater | Gin-clear winter flows, midges clustering in seams | Hold mid-seam below the dam; micro-drifts beat long casts |
| Stillwater damselfly afternoon | Stillwater / lake | Weed-edge damsel migrations on bright shores | Wade shallow weed points, strip slow along the edge drop |
| Pocket-water stonefly morning | Pocket water | Steep pockets, early stonefly crawls on wet cobble | Short hops between pockets, high-stick through white water |
| Meadow trico morning | Spring-creek meadow | Tiny tricos blanketing glassy flats after sunrise | Kneel below the pods; 7X tippet and tiny emergers win |
| Autumn baetis cloudy | Freestone meadow | Blue-wing olives on gray fall afternoons | Fish the bubble line where the riffle settles into a pool |
| Late-summer hopper banks | Meadow freestone | Windy banks tossing hoppers and ants into undercuts | Walk the sunny bank; slap-land foam patterns near grass |
| Evening sulfur hatch | Limestone creek | Classic sulfur duns, then dense spinner falls | Arrive early for duns; shift to rusty spinners at dusk |
Tap any hatch card and you land on a detail page built around silhouettes rather than photographs: behaviour notes, Latin hint, hook range, colour family, and four expandable life-stage cards. Each stage lists the artificial patterns that actually match that silhouette, with a substitute chain when your box is thin.
Silhouette note plus drift tip: dead-drift near the substrate and watch for micro-takes rather than obvious grabs.
The stage most anglers skip. Grease the tippet, not the fly, and let the trailing shuck sit in the surface film.
Downstream drift with soft presentations, matched by comparaduns, parachutes and CDC wings by shade family.
Evening foam-line work with spent-wing patterns — the stage the bench recommends the moment light drops.
Filter by insect order or type a colour, shade or profile word into one search field that scans both insects and artificials at once.
Every pattern carries a profile, a shade family and a hook range, so you can swap confidently when the exact fly is missing from your box.
One tap from any hatch opens the leader desk. It reads the hook range of the insect you are matching, averages it, and returns a butt-to-tippet build you can knot on the bank: total length, tippet X rating, and four labelled steps with diameters and lengths.
| Average hook | Tippet | Leader length |
|---|---|---|
| #6–10 | 3X–4X | 7.5–9 ft |
| #11–14 | 4X–5X | 7.5–9 ft |
| #15–18 | 5X–6X | 9 ft |
| #19–24 | 6X–7X | 9–12 ft |
The desk tab holds the day box: three time slots, a scrollable palette of patterns, and a stage you arrange by hand. Drag flies where you want them, snap to a grid, scale and rotate, bring a selection to the front, undo up to thirty steps — then share a plain-text kit card with whoever is meeting you at the pull-off.
Hit-testing happens the moment your finger lands, so the fly you touch is the fly that moves. Positions are stored as proportions, which keeps a layout intact on any screen size.
Found the right artificial on a hatch or pattern page? Pin it to the active slot without leaving the flow. The pin remembers which insect it was matched to, so the kit card explains itself later.
The share sheet sends a compact three-line summary — morning, midday and evening rows with pattern and bug names, plus a pinned count. Readable in any messenger, no attachment, no export format to learn.
Matching the fly is only a third of the job. The atlas tab bundles water-reading coaching, scored drills that explain the reasoning, and a month-by-month regional calendar — all seeded on device.
Current seams, riffle heads, pool tails, undercut banks, foam lines, weed-bed lanes, pocket slots and weed-edge drops. Each entry pairs a diagram-style silhouette with one concrete stand-and-cast instruction, cross-referenced to the packs where it matters.
Multiple-choice and order-the-steps drills with a scored check and a written explanation, so a wrong answer teaches something instead of just buzzing.
Browse any month and see which hatches are worth planning around, by region, with an intensity bar and a one-line note. Limestone valleys, high-desert tailwaters, Rocky Mountain foothills, alpine stillwaters, Cascades gorge, northern hardwoods, valley meadows and high prairie.
The whole app is designed around one loop that fits between rigging up and stepping in. Nothing here needs a signal bar.
Choose the pack that matches what is in front of you; defaults load with it.
Month, temperature, clarity, sky. The emergence list re-ranks as you tap.
Read behaviour, choose the stage, scan matched artificials and substitutes.
Take the tippet X and the four-step build straight from the hook size.
Pin morning, midday and evening flies, then share the kit card.
HatchMatch River Desk keeps its content in a local database and its preferences in local storage. There is no account, no hatch telemetry, no analytics SDK in the build, and no network sync to wait for in a canyon with one bar.
Water packs, insects, life stages, patterns, atlas entries, drills, calendar rows and your day-box pins live on the device.
Onboarding flag, °C/°F choice, reminder toggle, home water, last bench bands and the widget hatch label.
A compact widget in the desk’s teal-and-amber palette shows the current top-ranked hatch label without opening the app.
An optional daily local notification for your chosen focus window. Off by default, switched on and off in Settings.
HatchMatch River Desk is made by an independent developer, so support is answered personally rather than by a ticket robot. Bug reports, hatch corrections and feature ideas are all welcome — including grumpy ones about a ranking you disagree with.
Write in English or Ukrainian. We usually reply within 1–2 business days; on busy weekends it can stretch to three.
To speed things up, include your device model, Android version, the app version, and what you were doing when it went wrong. A screenshot of the screen in question helps more than a long description.
No. All content — water packs, hatch profiles, life stages, patterns, atlas entries, drills and the calendar — is seeded into a local database on first launch. The bench, the leader desk and the day box work in airplane mode, in a canyon, or on a boat with no signal at all.
Never. There is no login, no e-mail confirmation and no profile. The app does not collect accounts, location trails or hatch telemetry, and no analytics SDK ships in the build. Uninstalling the app removes the local data with it.
They are informed guidance, not a forecast. The scoring combines season, water temperature, clarity, sky and the water pack you selected, and the confidence label tells you how strong the case is — from high confidence down to long shot. Real rivers keep their own schedule, so treat the list as a starting hypothesis and let what you see on the water overrule it.
The stage suggestion follows the conditions you set. Low light pushes the recommendation toward spinners, cold water toward nymphs, bright days with caddis toward adults, and everything else defaults to the emerger in the surface film. Change the sky or temperature band and the recommendation shifts with it.
Positions save when you finish a drag, so a movement interrupted by a phone call may not persist. Use undo to step back up to thirty changes, then re-place and lift your finger to commit. If a pin is genuinely missing after a restart, write to us with your device model and Android version so we can reproduce it.
Two things to check. First, allow notifications for the app in Android settings — without that permission the reminder is created and silently dropped. Second, battery optimisation and strict power-saving modes on some devices delay background work, so a daily nudge may land later than expected. Reminders are always local; nothing is sent from a server.
Yes. Settings has a reset that rebuilds all seeded content — packs, insects, life stages, patterns, atlas entries, drills and calendar rows — plus the sample day box. Your own pins in the day box are replaced by that reset, so share the kit card first if you want to keep the list.
It is written for one. A three-step introduction explains the bench, the life stages and the day box, the atlas tells you where to stand before you worry about fly selection, and the academy explains the reasoning behind each recommendation instead of just handing you an answer. Experienced anglers tend to live on the bench and the leader desk.