Understanding recreational catch and effort is important for sustainably managing the world’s fisheries. However, collecting annual, high-resolution, recreational catch and effort data can be cost-prohibitive. As a result, some governments only conduct state-wide surveys of recreational fish catch once every several years. In this work, we present a methodology to estimate recreational catch during the years in between state-wide surveys. The method analyses information from more frequent surveys of recreational catch at select boat ramps. Using well-established statistical techniques, we provide an index of recreational catch derived from both the infrequent state-wide survey data and the frequent annual boat ramp data. All methods presented can be applied to estimate kept or released catches of fish. The approach adopted is flexible and does not assume any underlying distribution of the data. We illustrate the method with examples for three fish species with significant recreational catch: grass emperor (Lethrinus laticaudis), snapper (Pagrus auratus) and pearl perch (Glaucosoma scapulare).