Warming Spells following the lake turnover

[Guest Author]

Moose, I hear you about trying to find a way to get exact coordinates. I tried taking the Hot Spots map and using a metric scale ruler. I established a long. and lat. value for each tick on the scale. Then I measured first the long. position of the spot as close as I could get, for ex. say I got 23 ticks from the grid line to the right of the spot. I then multiplied the 23 times the value of each long. tick - say 23 x 11.63. That gave me a number to add to the longitude of the grid line to the right. Same with latitude. I then created a waypoint in the GPS. (I have the East chip from the NAVAID series). I can say that following that track to the point it seemed to get me fairly close to where the map said it should be. But once again, something about horseshoes. It's frustrating for me personally as I was a trained cartographer in the Air Force back in the late sixties, and I can't seem to get there! The process you are following may well pay off. In the meantime I will work with what I have. By zooming in on the GPS lake map and moving the cursor to the center of a bend in the channel, for example, then following the track to that point should get me pretty close to where I can idle in circles and get on the general area. Perhaps the GPS technology will improve to where you can get within 10 feet someday. Until then, since we are both pursuing the same thing, I will keep posting any progress. Right now, if I can just find a brush field surrounding a horseshoe bend in the channel I would be ecstatic! Good luck. Let's pray for a warm snap in December. I'd be happy to leave the rods in the box and just spend a day getting better with the electronic tools on board.

Tracker Jon

[Moose1am]

Tracker60:
You may be the guy I am looking for. If you made maps for the US Air Force then you should know your stuff. I was just thinking about trying to get in touch with some surveyors or engineers to see if they were aware of any gps units that display Indiana Plane Coordinates. This map system is used by the State of Indiana as it adhears to Political Boundaries unlike the UTM map system. And the grid is measured in Ft not Yards or Meters so it's shows much greater RESOLUTION. I can use a program called Corpscom (SP?) that allows me to input a map coordinate in the IPCS and calculate the same map coordiantes in the UTM map system. My GPS Garmin eTrex Vista has the capability to display UTM map coordinates or the regular Long and latitude systems and with it's WAAS turned on sometimes it's accurate to within plus or minu 10ft. That is close enough.

One could get close to the U bend in the old river and drop marker buoys to find the exact shape of the bend. The old river channel is not very wide. Those areas with sharp bends are ideal spots to fish especially if they have a ditch that flows from them back into a bay. Some areas I have fished have several ditches that lead out of the bay to the old river bed where it makes a sharp U turn.

I have been trained to read UTM maps but still the regular 7.5 min USGS Quadrangle Maps are not as acccurate as these Indiana Plane Coordinate system maps. I can use a calibrated ruler and figure the map coordinates from the paper maps but my copies are not very good. The contour lines on my paper copys are faint. The original copies were blue print paper and they were copies of the original maps that were printed onto mylar plastic sheets. So I have a copy of a copy. My digital copies of the blueprint paper maps are much better and show much more detail. Also I like the idea of using OziExplorer to calibate the digital maps. I am hoping that I can get much better accuracy. Pat Haus of Kentucy Hydrographix asked me to tell how how well this works when I finally test it out on the lake. It may not work like I intend it to. I was told that paper maps can shrink and expand with changing moisture levels and that can throw off the accuracy a lot. As you should know trying to measure in millimeter on a paper USGS map is limited. And the accuracy of the map itself can throw things off. Maybe that is why I am only half heartly working on my digial maps. Maybe deep down inside me I know it won't work as accurately as I wish. Still I continue at a very slow pace to work on this project.

The best thing to do is put your own brush piles out and mark them with a GPS or triangulate points on the shoreline to help find the spot again. This does work and I have been using this method on the lake I fish close to home. It's much easier to do also. LOL My last two trips in Oct produced 12 fish each time in just under a couple of hours. Didn't leave the house until around 3 pm and it got dark at 4:30pm. My crappie condos are starting to produce fish in the fall of the year. I just had to put out more than two condos in one area to finally get the fish to start to use them. A week before this I hit them good and caught a limit in under two hours on another site on the lake I fish. These are not huge slabs but they still are good to eat.

I have a mylar scale that allows me to read UTM maps from the blue tick marks. I can add or subtract distances from any spot on a usgs map and determine the map coordinates on a paper map. But it's a lot faster to do this with the computer and a calibrated map. Check out the OziExplorer Program. This guy from Austria developed this program. He has a neutred version that is shareware. But the retail program allows you to perform a 12 point map calibration and that should give the accuracy that I want. I think that the shareware version uses bitmap images and the retail version allows TIFF files to be use. I can change my digital maps from Paint Shop Pro 9 file formate to Tiff format once I am finished reducing and splicing them back into one big page. You see the original patoka lake maps were too big for my scanner. Each map page measures 19.5" x 13.5" and there were 20 something pages that made up the Patoka Lake map. I had to scan each 19.5"x13.5" map on an 8 by 10 scanner so I had to divide each page into quarters. I scanned the topright, topleft, bottom right and then the bottom left side of each page. That gave me four files. But I performed each scan at 600dpi. Now if I try to splice each quarter section together to map one map page the file size is over 400 MB. That file size is just too large for Paint Shop Pro 9 to handle. So I found that I could save a copy of the PSP9 files as Tiff files. Then I could use Adobe Elements 2.0 to splice a 100mb quarter section with another 100mb quater section to reproduce the top half of a original map. I did the same thing with the two bottom sections using Adobe. I was then able to splice the top half with the bottom half. But after that the file size was too big even for Adobe to work with. I tried using the Jusas program Photo Album to splice the PSP9 files together but it failed to work. Bummer.

It would have made my life so much easier if this would have worked.

I almost let Evansville Blue Print Company scan these paper maps for me. They only wanted $150 bucks to perform that job. I should have let them do that for me. But that is hindsight. I figured I could do it myself using a scanner that my neighbor gave to me. Only problem was the scanner was old and the drivers didn't work well with my computer. I got so frustrated trying to scan these images that it took me almost a year to finish the job. I had to at times reinstall the scanners drivers between each scan. Now that was a bitch. I would get so upset that I would stop scanning for days at a time and just didn't feel like fighting with these maps anymore. But then after a week went by I would get up the desire to tackle the job again. Now I have a newer HP scanjet legal sized scanner so hopefully if I ever have to do a job like this again It will go easier. I am not sure if the scanner was the problem or if my Paint Shop Pro 8 and Paint Shop Pro program was the problem. Either way it was a bitch to get the scans done.

Regards,

Moose1am

[Guest Author]

Moose,
I can identify with the frustration. Another thing that makes plotting off of paper maps and charts is the fact that they stretch after a little use making the possible error on the final coordinants even greater. Since it is too cold to fish I will spend time looking into anything I can find to solve the problem. Maybe between where you've been and where I go we can come up with something. Thanks for the lead on the Aussie software; I will take a look. Later.

Jon

[Team9nine]

Hey Moose/Jon,

While all this map talk stuff is fun and is a great way to kill some time through the winter, MHO is that you guys are spending a whole lot of effort for not much reward. Maps are nice and they have their place, but so many of the good spots on a lake are not on a map. All the "soft stuff", things like weedlines, stumpbeds, small drainage ditches, hard bottomed areas, riprap versus clay versus silt bottoms, silted in channels no longer like a map shows, shellbeds, fallen trees...I could go on and on.

Maps are great for knowing where the bluffs are, where the river channels run, maybe a house foundation or roadbed here and there and how to run a lake and about where you are; And the highly detailed maps starting to come out (like Hydrographix) are cool, but heck guys, just get out on the water and keep the unit turned on and you'll find way more places than you'll ever find on some map.

Relating places on a map to a spot on the lake is not too difficult once you have a little practice. You can read the magazines and watch the videos but it is no substitute for being on the water. Jon, if the weather ever breaks before the lakes freeze (that's looking like a big if - LOL) I'd be glad to take you out on one of these central IN lakes and spend the day showing you how to use electronics. We'll be sure to stop and catch some fish for dinner along the way, too.

If you are looking to run out to Flint at some point you'll need to check the water level out there. The lake had been dropped 8 feet and there was no way you were launching as little as 2 weeks ago. All this rain may have changed things for the better, but I'd check for sure before driving all the way out there with the boat in tow.

If you have a boat, a halfway decent graph and a cheap handheld GPS you will have more spots located in a short amount of time then you'll ever have by reading a map. It's really not that difficult and I usually make it a point to add a few new places everytime I'm out on the water.

If the weather breaks and I can get away I'll drop you an e-mail Jon and see if the schedules align.

-Team9

[Guest Author]

Team9,

Your point about finding what's out there by looking and noting is well taken. In fact I've found good stuff just that way. I think the best thing I could do is when I go to Patoka for the day is spend the first 3 or 4 hours just cruising and looking and learning about my sonar/gps unit. Marking the promising structure/cover I find, and then trying to get back on it afterward to fish it. My current search for knowledge is based on trying to find something that will get me closer to some of the good stuff that is on the maps. Last time out I looked and looked for a fish attractor - had to be close but I could never find it. But while searching I did find an unexpected hump of about 12 feet in 25 feet of water. It didn't fit the terrain at all. Maybe it is an old pile of dirt pushed up by a dozer. ? I set the waypoint right on top. I hope I can get back to it again. As for the fishing, I sincerely appreciate the offer you've made and would thoroughly enjoy it. Most winters the larger lakes don't freeze and we usually get 2-3 day spells of fifty degree temps at least once or twice. I might sacrifice my wife's dog as an offering to the weather gods! Best, and keep in touch. Thanks again.

Jon

[Moose1am]

I fished Patoka when it first opened and also received some information about the lake from my godfather. They made the fish attractors out of huge logs that were chained together with big wires. Some of these logs were floating when the lake was first filled up. So you could see them on the surface. The trees were about 2ft to 3ft in diamter and about 20ft long in some cases.

I also read that they use old tires that were formed together and sunk. They are called Tire Fish Attractors. The logs were labeled Rectangular Fish Attractors and Circular Fish Attractors on the very early maps of Patoka Lake.

I tried to locate some of these fish attractors using the Garmin Mapsource Fishing Hot Spots Digital map on my Garmin eTrax Vista using the onscreen map display. When I got the boat's map screen pointer over the icon for the hazard nothing showed up on my depth finder. I think that the harards are not showing up properly on my map. Who knows why. Maybe it was just this one hazard (fish attractor) that I was working with this day. I have not tried to locate many of these using this method.

You could be within 100ft of these things and not see them on my depth finder if the water is shallow. I guess it depends on how much of the bottom your depth finder displays. I have a humminbird lcr 8000 unit and the transducer cone is only 20deg. So in 30ft of water I can only see a 10ft round area of the lake bottom. So I could be off a bit and not see the submerged raft of logs.

I wish that they would rename these icons from hazards to fish attractors to make their maps more accurate.


Regards,

Moose1am

[Moose1am]

I agree with Team9 in that being on the water is the best way to learn the lake. Can't argue with that statement.

I use my maps to explore the lake before I go. I use them to give me a plan on where to fish.

I can't go fishing that often so when I do go to Patoka I want to be organized and have an idea where I am going to fish.

I once tried finding a bend in the old river bed upstream from the Hwy 145 bridge. Actually it was upstream from the Osborn Ramp. I found that my map on my gps Garmin Mapsorce FHS Patoka Lake Map showed me where the old river channel was located but it was a flooded forest in that area. Trying to work though all those trees made life difficult. This bottom land forest area was thick with trees before the lake was filled. Now it's stick thick with a lot of dead trees (telephone poles) I fished the drops in this spot but could not find any fish.

Over the last two years I have been checking the maps and then fishing certain spots that look good on the map to see if there are fish there. I used the new maps to find old ditches that dont' show up on the FHS maps of Patoka. I verified that these ditches shown on the new maps were actually still there. I caught fish off them. And I could easily find the old brush that grew up along the sides of the ditches. Guess the farmers can't plow that area so they didn't bother to cut the brush in the ditches before the lake was flooded. That brush is still there today. Maybe other people have put brush in along the ditches or maybe it's just lasted over the years.

I just wish that I lived as close to Patoka as I do to BlueGrass. Now then I could really spend a lot more time learning that lake. It's a 150 mile round trip for me so I don't get to go that often.

Now Larry on the other hand has the advantage. He has had these maps for over 20 years and he has fished Patoka a lot ever since it opened up. He now has a cabin in the area so he can spend the weekends up there fishing if he does not have to work overtime.

I spent some time online today and downloaded OziExplorer and use the Trial Version for a few minutes. It does not have a built in version of the Indiana Plane Coordinate System Grid System. It does however have a user Grid system. But that is a real pain in the butt.

I wish that my maps had some utm markings on them so that I could calibate them in OziExplorer. But I am afraid they don't. I would have to find know landmarks on these maps and figure out the UTM coordinates of those landmarks before calibrating these maps. Once calibrated I think they would be very useful for the partime fisherman.

Regards,

Moose1am