Mapping A Lake

[J-Doc]

Is that a shad the bass spit up?

[Feathers and Fins]

Yup 5'' gizzard shad

[bfishn]

Really nice man!

Drooling over those Navionics maps.

I did my first Beaver map by highlighter on the old Corps plat book one particularly cold winter about 25 years ago. What a huge pain. But I learned.

Photoshop became my friend late last century, I did both Beaver & TR in a couple months. Here's a section of TR with the color format I settled on.

[Feathers and Fins]

Man I feel your pain about TR its a hard one to color even with Navionics and all the tools. contour lines way to close.

[bfishn]

What I learned; Start with at least 200 DPI if possible. Then enlarge the image until the thinnest drawing line is about 2-3 pixels. You still have to manually continue any broken contour lines, but the magic wand or paintbucket takes over from there really well.

[Feathers and Fins]

Yup, that's it basically, the Navionics maps are great as for the most part the lines stay solid so you can use the paint can pretty easy. If you don't have it here it is http://www.navionics.com/en/webapp Then transfer it after you use Adobe to Excel for the insert pictures. save as pdf and then reopen in the adobe and save as a jpg.

[J-Doc]

You guys just need to learn how to read a contour line without painting pretty colors. :-)

[Feathers and Fins]

Really, coming from the guy who was drooling over the maps I sent him lol.

[bfishn]

Ironically, you learn so much about the lake, painting the pretty colors, that you don't have as much need for it when you're done. There's a few parts of the lake I've never been that I still "know" pretty well because of coloring the maps.

I still fall back to them sometimes. Say I found some fish on 30 ft channel breaks. A quick look at my map for all the spots where yellow meets red reveals all the other similar spots in a flash.

[Feathers and Fins]

so very true but one step further, You can even look at the direction for wind and shade eleminating even more bad areas for productive areas in the same conditions.