About

BC Trout Finder is a free seven day fishing forecast on the exact coordinate of 1,844 British Columbia stillwaters. It is made by one person, in BC, and it is not a directory scraped from somewhere else.

Who makes it

Tony builds and runs this on his own. There is no company behind it, no team, and no investor. If something on the site is wrong, he is the person who fixes it, and contact@bctroutfinder.com reaches him.

It started because the information an angler actually needs before driving two hours up a forestry road was scattered across a regulations synopsis, a provincial atlas, a recreation site register and a weather service that knows nothing about lakes. Putting those together for one lake is an evening. Doing it for 1,844 of them is what this is.

Where the data comes from

Every source is named, and none of it is invented:

• Lake positions and outlines come from the BC Freshwater Atlas. 1,823 of the 1,844 lakes carry a position verified against the province's own polygon.
• Roads come from the BC Digital Road Atlas, under the Open Government Licence for British Columbia.
• Campsites and boat launches come from the Recreation Sites and Trails BC register. 1,358 lakes have at least one on file.
• Regulations come from the BC Freshwater Fishing Regulations Synopsis. It is the synopsis that governs, never this site.
• Weather comes from Open-Meteo, read on each lake's own coordinate rather than the nearest town.

What we will not claim

This is the part that took the longest and it is the reason to trust the rest. A plausible-looking record is worse than a sparse one, so:

• We never tell you the ice will hold. The winter model reports whether a lake has likely frozen. It will never give you a thickness and it will never give you a green light. Ice varies year to year and across a single lake. Check locally, every time.
• Unknown means unknown. 885 lakes have a maximum depth on file. The rest say so, rather than being given a plausible number. The same goes for elevation, access and stocking.
• A wrong pin is worse than no pin. 21 lakes have no verified position, so they are published without one instead of being dropped somewhere convincing.
• Generated facts were removed. Elevation and access descriptions that had been produced from templates rather than sources were deleted rather than left to look authoritative.
• Provincial stocking records are not here. They are licensed Access Only, so this site carries none of them rather than reproducing them without the right to.

How it is paid for

The app is free and there is no paid tier. It carries advertising on some pages and a small number of regional shops and lodges are listed. A listing does not buy a better position on the map, and it never changes a lake's forecast or its score.

Corrections

If a pin is on the wrong water, a regulation has changed, or a lake is missing, write to contact@bctroutfinder.com. Corrections from readers have already moved pins, renamed lakes and added waters that the provincial atlas had never filed. It is the fastest way this gets better.

Covering 9 management regions across British Columbia.