Version 1.0, live
A fishing almanac for every lake, river and pond near McMurray, PA and East Canton, OH: where to go, what to tie on, and whether it's safe to eat.
Free to open. Works on a phone, and the whole thing is a single file.
Sheet 1 / Where to go
The atlas covers 21 public waters: reservoirs, park lakes, creeks and rivers within reach of three starting towns: Malvern and East Canton in Ohio, McMurray in Pennsylvania. Pick a starting town, a species or a preset, or drag the five-point rose yourself, and the whole board re-ranks.
The five weights are kid catch rate, trophy potential, variety, convenience and evidence. Three of them are the author's judgment, and the sheet underlines them so they never pass for survey data.
Sheet 1 / The plates
Each lake is a survey-chart plate generated from its real acreage, depth and shoreline, seeded from its name, so a 1,500-acre reservoir and a 76-acre impoundment never look alike. Open one and you get the species on record, the agency survey behind them, the stocking dates, and its consumption advisory first, in red.
A figure is either sourced or it is a dash. An unsurveyed depth is never a zero and never a guess.
Sheet 3 / What to tie on
Choose a water and the atlas writes the day: which licence you need, what to tie on, the hook size, the bait, the rod, the 2026 stocking dates, how far it is from your starting town, and what to know before you keep a fish.
Beside it sit the National Weather Service forecast and, for the eight waters that have a USGS gauge, today's flow judged against that gauge's own record. Technique advice is drawn in outline and labelled as editorial, so it never passes for a measurement.
Fish safety
Do not eat.
Of the 21 waters, 11 carry a consumption advisory from the state agencies in Ohio or Pennsylvania. The atlas puts each one on the water's card and its sheet, and gives the one rule a family has to remember: do not eat carp out of Little Chartiers Creek.
The advisories are quoted from the agencies and cited, not paraphrased into something softer. Check the agency's current advisory before you keep a fish.
Sheet 2 / The Descent
Sheet 2 turns the board into a dive. A depth gauge runs down the side as you scroll, from the margin where a bobber and a bank are enough, through the shallows where an eleven-year-old actually catches fish, down to the thermocline where the water is cold and the fish are beyond a bobber.
It is the same sourced dataset in another typeface and another light, so you can read it as a table or as a place.
Colophon
Stewart Gregerson made it for fishing with his son Liam, and shared it for anyone who fishes the same water. It was written with Claude Code, a second model audited it cold, and it has 125 commits since the first one on 15 August 2026.
The atlas is a single index.html: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no framework, no build step, no bundler. The dataset and the fonts are inlined, so opened from a file path it makes no network request at all, and works in a valley with no signal. Served from its URL it calls only USGS and the National Weather Service, for the live readings.
Each chart is a drowned-valley basin generated from the water's acreage, depth, shoreline and form, seeded from its name, so a reload is pixel-identical. The species and bait plates are raster images made with the Gemini image API.
Four rounds of reading agency sources, each recorded with what it got wrong, plus a standing-risks file for what could still be wrong. One entry: a USGS request for four statistics came back successful with one column silently empty, and the top safety verdict could not fire for two rounds until the request asked for everything the service publishes.
Five suites run on every push: the page in real Chromium, a tie-out audit of more than two thousand checks that re-derives every displayed figure from the dataset, the live layer replayed against captured USGS and NWS payloads, the optional assistant worker, and the file's promises about itself. A check is accepted only after it has been shown to fail on a deliberate mutation of what it guards.
Every figure on the sheet names its source on the sheet.
| What | Who | Licence or terms |
|---|---|---|
| Live streamflow, the daily statistics it is judged against, hydrography outlines | U.S. Geological Survey | U.S. federal government work, public domain |
| Forecasts and alerts | National Weather Service | U.S. federal government work, public domain |
| Address geocoding for park entrances | U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder | U.S. federal government work, public domain |
| Ohio fish consumption advisories, Sandy Creek and Tuscarawas River studies | Ohio EPA | Public records of the State of Ohio, quoted and cited |
| Ohio lake maps, property pages, fishing regulations | ODNR Division of Wildlife | Public records of the State of Ohio, quoted and cited |
| Pennsylvania stocking schedules, biologist reports, licence fees | Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission | Public records of the Commonwealth, quoted and cited |
| Pennsylvania fish consumption advisories | PA DEP, PFBC and PA Department of Health | Public records of the Commonwealth, quoted and cited |
| Water-quality studies | University of Cincinnati (Botner et al. 2018), USGS SIR 2024-5045, Penn State (Pankratz and Warner 2024) | Cited for their findings; read the originals |
| Rod, reel and tackle-box specs | Pflueger and Flambeau product pages | Manufacturer facts, cited |
| Species and bait plates | Generated with the Gemini image API | MIT (this repo) |
| Fonts on this page and in the atlas: Instrument Serif, Libre Franklin, Space Mono (the atlas also uses IBM Plex Mono, Karla and Archivo) | Their designers, via Google Fonts | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |