How 2 Tuesday - Keep A Fishing Journal

Tom Rowland Podcast

When fishing consistently, especially if you are a guide, it is super important to journal. The advantages of this is that you save yourself from forgetting a spot, and you might be able to plan vacations due to your journal about what the conditions were like when the fishing was on. I am a huge advocate for journalling about where and when you found some fish and being able to track them down over and over again because you wrote it down.

When I first started out journalling I was very attentive to details and tried to document everything. The issue is that with guiding, meeting with clients, spending time with family, cleaning the boat and more it was hard to find the time to journal and I quickly began to put it on the back burner. Luckily Simon Becker shared some tips with me about quick and pertinent information I need when journalling. I would use the Florida Sportsman Tide Charts and document my notes on them. Here are the 4 things I would recommend you note:

1. Date
2. Time of Day
3. Location (GPS coordinates or even just “tower flat”)
4. What did you find there (did you find redfish? Were they tailing? Did you find tarpon? Were they eating?)

I know there are some people that will say that barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction and so on are very important. They are certainly extremely important, but when I was journalling all of that information it was taking too much time and energy and I quickly would burn out. So with the 4 things from above you can write it down in a couple of seconds and then later you can go on sites such as Weather Underground and find all of that information about the weather at a later time.

The most important thing to do is write it down, do not fool yourself that you can remember it later. Because months and years later you will have so many other things going on you will not remember the specifics about some tarpon you found in a certain area on a certain day. That information is crucial to being able to replicate when you are planning a vacation or taking out some customers and knowing that the conditions are right, if you go to the same location you will likely find the same thing.

Because it is no coincidence that a school of tarpon will be tailing in a certain area. If you match the same conditions they will almost certainly be in the same spot every time.

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