Overexploitation and climate change are increasingly causing unanticipated changes in marine ecosystems, such as higher variability in fish recruitment and shifts in species distribution, pressing for developing fisheries oceanography. In the meantime, operational oceanography rapidly progresses and its products become easy to access to a large community, among them fisheries scientists. Multiyear oceanographic reanalyses (hindcasts) were identified has a priority product by the ICES WG on Operational Oceanographic Products for Fisheries and Environment (WGOOFE). We performed a 37 years hindcast (1972-2008) run with a coupled physical-biogeochemical model (ECO-MARS3D) over the Bay of Biscay, using realistic meteorological and run-off forcing. We first describe the coupled model, as well as the mesoscale and biological indices that were derived as potential drivers of fish populations. Then we use a Multiple Factorial Analysis (MFA) allowing for a synthetic characterization of the seasonal variability of the environment in the Bay of Biscay, based on the whole set of indices. We also rapidly go through the main trends detected by the hindcast over the last decades. Last, we review the different use we made from this hindcast in relation to anchovy life cycle in the Bay of Biscay. These applications range from forcing higher trophic level models, to fish habitat statistical modelling relating egg or adult field distribution to environment covariates, and to finally testing the ability of integrated indices in explaining the recruitment variability.