Fishing Tips: Hook Depth, Bomb Dodging and the 60-Second Clock

Updated October 2026

Fishing looks like a relaxed game about dangling a line, but it is really a sixty-second time-management puzzle. Every drop of the hook is a small investment: a few seconds of travel in exchange for 10, 30 or 90 points, with a 30-point fine waiting for anyone who blunders into the floating bombs. This guide breaks down how the hook actually moves, what it can and cannot catch, and how to spend a minute of line time for the biggest possible total.

How the line really behaves

Pressing anywhere on the playfield starts the hook sinking at a steady speed. Letting go sends it back up. If you never let go, the hook keeps sinking until it touches the sea floor and then turns around on its own. There is no way to stop it halfway and hover; it is always either going down or coming up.

Two details trip up new players. First, once the hook has started rising, pressing again does not send it back down. You have to wait until it is all the way back at the boat, lift your finger and press once more. Second, the boat follows your finger sideways only while you are pressing. Slide your thumb left or right during a drop and the boat glides after it, dragging the hook with it, so a drop is really a diagonal path that you can steer. The boat cannot go closer than 36 pixels to either edge of the screen, so fish hugging the very edge are often out of reach.

The hook also sinks faster than it rises. It drops at 150 pixels per second, comes back empty at 130, and slows to 95 once something is attached. A heavy catch therefore spends far longer on the way up than it did on the way down, and that slow climb is where most of your clock goes.

What sits at each depth

Below the waterline the sea is split into three bands. The top third (32 percent of the water) holds small fish worth 10 points. The middle band, from 32 to 62 percent of the depth, holds medium fish worth 30. The bottom band holds the large fish worth 90. Each band refills on its own schedule: a small fish can appear every 0.85 seconds up to six at once, a medium every 1.6 seconds up to four, and a large one every 3.4 seconds with no more than two in the water.

The size of each fish is also its target size. The hook connects when it gets within six pixels of a fish's body, so a large fish offers a catch zone about 58 pixels wide and 36 tall, while a small one is only about 34 by 23. Large fish are also the slowest swimmers, cruising at 28 to 46 pixels per second against 60 to 95 for the small ones. Big fish are easier to hit than their depth suggests. The catch is getting there.

The first-touch rule decides your deep dives

The hook grabs the first fish it touches and immediately starts reeling in, whether you are still holding or not. It checks on the way up as well as on the way down. That sounds harmless until you aim at a 90-point fish and a 10-point fish swims through your line two seconds earlier. The dive is over, and you have spent the trip on the cheapest catch in the sea.

We tested this with a simple bot running the game's own movement code. When it dived straight at deep fish without checking the water above them, it came back with something smaller about three times out of four. The fix is to choose your moment, not just your target. Before pressing, look at the column under the boat. If small fish are heading into it, either wait a second for them to pass or slide the boat to a clear lane and lead the deep fish from there. Because the large fish swim slowly, you can usually predict where one will be two or three seconds from now and start your drop above that spot.

The same rule works for you when the line is empty. A hook coming back up after a miss can still catch something, so releasing early near a passing school is not wasted time.

Bombs: what they cost and when they cannot hurt you

A floating bomb appears about every 2.4 seconds, with at most four in the water at once. They drift slowly, at 22 to 40 pixels per second, so a single bomb can take ten seconds or more to cross the screen. Each one picks a band at random: roughly 35 percent float through the shallow band, 39 percent through the middle and 26 percent through the deep water. Touching one costs 30 points (your score never drops below zero), destroys the bomb and sends the hook home empty.

Losing three small fish worth of points is a heavy fine, but there is a useful exception in the code. Bombs are only checked while the hook is empty. Once a fish is on the line, the hook passes straight through any bomb on the way up. So the dangerous part of a dive is the descent and any empty return. Plan your drop path around bombs, and stop worrying about them once something has bitten.

In our simulations, even a bot that skipped targets with a bomb in the path still hit two or three bombs per round. You will hit some too, so treat a bomb as a lost few seconds rather than a reason to stop fishing.

Budgeting the sixty seconds

On a typical modern phone held upright, we measured how long each trip takes. Reaching the middle of the shallow band takes about 0.7 seconds and reeling a small fish back takes about 1.2, so a quick surface catch costs roughly two seconds. A medium fish costs nearly five seconds for the round trip, and a deep fish about eight. Taller screens have more water, so all of these grow a little on bigger devices.

On paper that makes deep fish the best value, at around eleven points per second of line time against five or six for the shallower fish. In practice, interceptions and bombs eat into that edge. In our simulation, a bot that only fished the surface averaged about 435 points per round, one that chased only deep fish averaged about the same, and one that simply picked whichever visible fish offered the most points per second of travel averaged roughly 520. The lesson is flexibility: take the deep fish when its lane is clear, and fill the gaps with quick surface catches instead of waiting.

The clock runs on real time and starts the moment a round begins, not when you first drop the hook. The time bar turns yellow below 40 percent (24 seconds) and red below 15 percent (9 seconds).

The final seconds

A fish only scores when it reaches the boat. If the clock hits zero while one is still on the line, those points are simply lost. With around five seconds left, do not hook anything deep. Reeling a large fish up from the middle of its band takes close to five seconds on its own. In the last two or three seconds, only a surface fish near the boat is still worth trying for.

• Steer while you sink. Leading a fish by sliding the boat is often better than waiting for it to swim under you.
• Lift between drops. Keeping your thumb down after a catch does nothing, because the next drop needs a fresh press.
• Relax once hooked. With a fish attached, bombs cannot touch you, so use the climb to plan the next drop.
• Don't switch away. If the window loses focus the hook starts reeling in, and the clock keeps running while you are gone.

Your best score is kept on your device, and any round above zero can be saved to the Hall of Fame from the end card.