How does the fish Deeper page help you plan out your fishing trip when you are sitting at home?

Before the haters get on their high horse and say it’s cheating. I’m only looking at the bathymetry of the lake bed and understanding the whole lake’s contours and how the fish travel about their underwater highways.

Once you have mapped as much as I have, you get an understanding of when you see carp topping and moving around. Of where they have come from and where they are going to. I don’t believe it’s taking away watercraft as I screenshot all the swims and their prominent features when I’m looking on my laptop or tablet in the comfort of my home. You still have to put the time in to get as much information as I have accumulated, which is no different than spending time over the close season mapping feature with a marker float and jotting it down on paper. The world has moved on and we don’t send letters handwritten anymore, we send emails.

Back to the subject in question.

Firstly, find the area that you have seen the carp showing and then search on your personal page for that area, zoom in and study the contours. You can work out where the best spot in the swim is to intercept them from.

An 8ft drop-off may be leading down from a 5ft gravel bar.

You still have to observe the carp’s movement around the lake and comprehend their reasoning as to why they will be moving.

Once you have located your hot spots in multiple swims, you can simply arrive, find the carp, check your information, and set about getting the rods and bait out extra.

You can measure the distance from your swim and calculate the number of wraps needed for 10ft, 12ft, or even 13ft rods, flick a lead out and feel it down if you’re after that ‘donk’ or simply chuck a bag out.

This is the same spot, but without any overlays, it also helps you understand where the carp are traveling from or to.

You can zoom out and check for horizon makers, all this is at your fingertips. This can all be done at home and you can build up a portfolio of swims in a very short space of time. I use to do all this in a notebook with a pencil and sketch put the treeline and distance to the spots. To this day, I can’t understand why distance sticks took so long to come out as a tool for fishing. I use to walk out the distance and use power gum on the line, I also counted the number of posts along the fence line and then stuck a peg in the ground. On occasions, I moved other people’s pegs but that’s a whole different story. We all had bank sticks, so why on earth didn’t we think of distance sticks in the 80s?

The above spot (example) in this write-up is where I’d had quite a few fish from over the years and also where my bleak winter of 2022 finally came to an end after capturing 3 carp and losing one.

This does not take away the watercraft of arriving at the lake, looking for carp and talking to other anglers. It’s about understanding what you can see, what is underneath that you can’t, and when a carp shows you know exactly what’s out there. After all, the effort I put in with marker floats and mapping lakes by hand, is simply not going to be as accurate.

Top Tips

The bigger the screen, the better understanding.

Until next time

Richard