GPS – Devil’s in the Details
Information is a funny thing. There’s so much of it on the fly fishing related boards that has no value to anyone except the person writing it, and at the same time a real nugget can come out of all that chum on rare occasions.
When you are new to something so consuming as fly fishing, it is the boards that seem to provide fountains of information for the asking. Sure, you could subject yourself to cyber bullies, and know-it-all rednecks, or any number of other miscreants. But when you are gathering information like a sponge, it is difficult to discriminate between what is true and right, and what is false and wrong. And it is after many months of mild participation on a few boards I have gone cold turkey off all except one – the itinerant angler’s boards. There seems to be a modicum of respect on that board, and an effort to keep things on a bit of a higher level of discourse than some Texas based boards.
Another side of the boards is that it is easy to stampede fishers to a specific spot with frantic reports of many, or large, fish at Location Y. Two such examples were Texoma after the floods (anyone heard anything about the tailrace lately), and more recently the Catch & Release (C&R) area of the Blue River in Oklahoma. There was a time (sounds like an old timer talking) when the fish were crazy abundant in the water below Denison Dam on Texoma, but it got hit and hit hard. All the huffing and puffing, and all the photographs, blew that house down long ago. Really, it was an exceptional phenomenon brought on by an extreme set of circumstances that are rarely repeated. Stories abound about guys in the parking lot below the Denison Dam selling their “miracle flies” to the gullible who did not realize you could catch Stripers on just about anything due to the unique ecological circumstances brought on by the flooding.
This past fall and winter, I was one of the first few to bring attention to the C&R area of the Blue on a board, and I was quickly peppered with poster’s private messages wanting a map showing that area. I gladly provided a map or link to that location, or to one of my posts on the Blue. The last time we hit the Blue, we fished about four hours and I caught one measly fish – compared to dozens in early December. Something had happened, and we suspect it was either poaching, or (God I hope not) extreme pressure brought to bear by a burst in popularity of the C&R area on boards.
It was then that I publicly vowed to disseminate detailed information on locations on this site only, and so far that has been the case. However tempting it is to offer free (for what they cost) tidbits to folks looking for action, I have struggled to forego the local boards and comment on local fishing spots – from down the street to Galveston Island – only on texasflycaster.com. Lurking on other boards is fun now.
Then, I started thinking; Well if this is the only place to find the information, why not go to the extreme and give a location’s detail down to a GPS coordinate? It may sound like fuzzy logic, but what are the odds anyone will actually make the effort to go beyond the broad geographic location anyway? So, if you see some strange numbers appearing in a tweet, or in a story, that would be the electronic X that marks the fishing spot. Honestly, it pales in comparison to the electronics on your typical bass boat, and if you choose to find the electronic X, all I can say is tune in, zoom in and FISH ON!
Category: Culture on the Skids, Fishing Reports, GPS, TECHNICAL
