In years past, I kept a notebook on again/off again. I'd mostly tally species of trout and what I caught them on, but I'd often find that I'd end up with multiple notebooks and no consolidated information. I also wasn't all that good with getting the data transferred to a spreadsheet. Inspired by
this topic, I set out to find the right combination of documentary materials for this year.
I've come up with the following, that is serving me well (not just this year, I've used some of the online tools in the past, but this is what things have to evolved to for me):
These apps are Android specific, or at least thats the phone OS that I use them on. I don't know if they are available on iOS. Many of the places I fish don't have cell service in the stream area itself, but do in the parking lot area. Thats fine by me - I put the phone in Airplane mode, which affords me peace and quiet (for the odd time that you walk into a section that has a bit of service and the phone rings or notifies you of a text or email). The GPS still works fine - its all about location!
I document my walking portion of the excursion with
Google Tracks. At the start of my fishing excursion, I begin recording the track and let it finish until I'm done. I can then export the tracks as GPX or KML files for use in desktop applications.
For the overall trip itself, I document its existence with
Memoires. At the parking lot, I create a new memory entry. The app pulls in the current location and the current weather. I enter the name of the creek and proceed to fish. After I'm done, I go back and add some details about the trip, and anything that was, well, memorable. I attach any photos I take of fish or the stream or anything else related to the trip at this point.
For each fish that I catch, I recently found
My Fishing Journal Widget. The goal of this app is to allow one to quickly record the information about a fish that you catch. You "Add Fish" and it can pull location and weather and allow you to enter other items - species, length, weight, water clarity and depth, what you caught it with, and lets you take up to four pictures. It takes minimal time to add a fish; the species is prefilled with what the last fish you caught was and all the other info is optional. You can also load previously caught fish in and it will use EXIF data (if it exists) for date and time, as well as location. It also provides some neat summary info, in the form of a map that shows the number of fish you caught in a location, a "Live Well" that shows each fish, and allows you to filter both of those items. Its still in beta, but the developer is responsive to feature requests and suggestions and it fills a niche that every other app I tried for logging fish fell short in. Thanks to the app, I can accurately tell you I've got 15 brookies, 6 browns, and 1 rainbow that I caught this year. I also know I've got two chubs, but they didn't make the cut for entry.
For truly memorable fish, I use my phone's camera app to record them, or the hole they came from. These photos are attached to the Memoires entry for the day and also attached to any fished that is logged in My Fishing Journal.
Finally, I have been videotaping stream excursions from start to finish using a ContourHD video camera. The model I have is EOL I think even though I just got it. Newer models have support for Bluetooth, which enables you to display the video using an app on your phone. I have a headband mount for it and it provides a point-of-view documentary of the entire fishing outing. I've managed to fill up my hard drive completely with footage, due to the warm weather. I wanted to use it so that hopefully some day, when I catch a truly memorable fish or see something out of the ordinary, I'll have it videoed. I'll put some footage up sometime if anyone is interested. Yesterday, I picked up the attack of a black-as-night brown trout that chased my bugger but that I missed; today, I filmed my discovery of a rib cage streamside.
I use Picasa to organize my photos locally, and post them to private albums on Picasaweb.google.com. I use Youtube for video posting. I use Google "My Maps" to document stream sections and then overlay this on my phone, which I can then use Google Navigation to get to.
I know that when I was a kid, one of the things we always clamored for Sunday evenings was to "look at slides". This mean breaking out the slide projector and looking at old slides that we had taken of our family as we grew up. Someday, I hope the digital entries that I create today will be of a nature that I can look back on them and be pleased.
