How to Read a Lake Map for Bass Fishing

Video Transcript

"Now you have got some equipment and you want to go bass fishing and maybe you have gone to a new lake or some place you have never been and you are going to fish a tournament and you want to try to figure out how or where or what you have got to do. The first thing you need to do is contact a local tackle shop, maybe get on line, look at some other tackle shops. You want to get you some really nice maps, you know something with some really good detail, shows road beds and river channels if you're fishing a river, a lake, maybe some old town sites and things like that but get you a really good topographical map of the lake, just about any tackle shop in the local area is going to have them and if they don't, you know and you are going on a long trip and you don't want to take the chance get on line and go to like the fishing map company or Delmore or Navaco and just check out their stuff and see what they have because you know maps are $5, $6, $7 a piece and you'll be able to find and get a lot of wealth of information on it and then you know as you are doing your research and if you are doing it in plenty of time you can start marking your map on certain areas you want to go check and so you are not just fishing blind and you can look at contours and see what other people are talking about on the internet. So why don't we take a second and I'll show you some stuff on a map of what you need to look for. This is a map that I got for a tournament I just, an FLW tournament that I just fished up in Washington on the Columbia River so it's a really great place and it has so much water for you to cover but there is a lot of dangers and everything else for you too. Now one of the things I like to do with my maps is not so much write on them with notes on them but when I catch fish in certain areas in certain pieces I want to go look for then I'll use certain colors like pink is something I am catching fish on or a yellow to like go investigate or a blue is a maybe. Like for this map I went out and we found some islands. We got a mile marker, channel marker right on here and it had a very shallow hump on it, current flowing around it. We were able to catch some fish off the down side on that. Right here we have got a corner on a point. We've got current coming across the big flat. We've got a really deep ledge coming off of this and a corner on the upstream side, fish were kind of stacked on this pretty good, steep walls all the way around it then we had a flat spot on this so the fish, and there was grass growing on it so the fish were up on those kind of areas. You just need to really look at contours, look for islands, look for markers, power lines coming across, the bridges. We have got some bridges right here. We have got power lines coming across and then when you're doing that then you can go look for a man made structure like I said earlier you know maybe some towns when they flooded the place with the reservoir. If it is a natural lake you can maybe go look for deep ledges or grassy stuff. When you are using your paper maps get the digital maps that go in your Lowrance electronics and put those in there so you can coordinate your paper map with your digital map and they don't always line up all the same or have the same stuff. One might have more information on it than the other and a paper map will let you write notes on it and keep track of things a little bit better and so I always like to have both of them. You can way point your stuff on your Lowrance, you can put little gentle marks on your paper and keep yourself notes and keep them for later, put them in a safe place and store them, put them in plastic bags because you never know, two or three years later you might have another tournament and you might be going up there and you might have stumbled on to the winning fish from your map from three years ago. Don't lose them."