Keeping Record Of Your Trips

by gunner

It is important to keep some sort of record of your fishing trips, no matter what kind of fish you are going after.  I have records of bass trips, cat trips, musky trips…you name it.  It serves a few purposes that come in handy throughout the rest of the year and into the following years.

(At the end of this article I will have a sample record sheet that I use; feel free to print it if you want to.)

When you keep records, after a while, you build up your own personal library of fishing information on lakes and rivers that you fish.  You can write down the time, temperature (both air and water), water clarity, water depth, sky, location, baits/lures used, etc…   Then, when you go back out to that body of water, you can see that this day was like a certain day a week ago or a month ago or even a year ago…and you can go back through the journal and see what was working for you then.  It is a good starting point for the day, and it can take most of the guess-work out of the first few hours.

You can go to any office store and get some sort of little plastic binder and the plastic sheets to protect the pages.  How I do mine…when I break for lunch while fishing, I’ll write down the information that has happened to that point, and the rest I will write down when I get home.  A friend of mine just waits till he is home and unloads everything and sits down to relax to enter his information.  As I get going I may convert all the information onto the computer…but that will be a winter project for when I can’t do anything else.

If you fish tourneys this is a valuable tool to have.  After all the information on the maps and depth finders…written info about what was working before on a similar day is just more ammo for you and improves your chances on the day.  We are always looking for something to give us an edge on tourney day…and you can make one by keeping notes of each trip.

You can make one big binder of information with labels for each different place.  Or, you can make one for lakes and a separate one for rivers, etc…and/or one for bass, one for cats, one for musky, etc.  It is up to you and what works for you.   Each of us have certain ways we like to do things and have things done.  I used to take a little recorder with me and just record myself telling all the information…so I have tried different ways to do this.  The one thing that is important is to do it as soon as possible so you don’t forget a bait, or a little tucked-away place on the water, or even a nice weed bed somewhere.  The more information you have and the sooner you can get it down, the better tool you have for tourney day.

Here is a link to a basic catfish sample page, feel free to print this out and use it for your own records.

Think about it and give it a try, you may be glad you did!

Good fishing…

gunner