What Does It Get Me?

No matter where you live, within a couple hours' drive are some big chunks of public land. Chances are, these big areas contain lots of fishable water, but there's a problem: How do you find the good water without wasting tons of time and wearing out your hiking boots? Sure, you could hike every square foot of a watershed, but there's a better way to refine your search.

There are lots of reasons you might want to fish on public land, as opposed to, say, a well-known tailwater. First of all, there's the privacy. Nothing beats a remote forest creek for solitude; you won't see any canoes or party floats here. Second, the fishing can be great. Obscure species, such as Southern-strain brookies and Apache trout, are obvious targets, but many public properties hold lots of bigger fish, too. Rainbows and browns alike make spawning runs out of lakes into tributary streams all over the country. These lake-run fish can easily cross the five-pound mark, and many of them have never seen a fly. Enthusiastic fisheries managers planted steelhead and even salmon in many out-of-the-way locations back in the anything-goes 1960s. Some of those fish hold on, too. For obvious reasons, nobody's going to lead you by the hand to such excellent fishing, so if you want in, you need to stake your own claim.

Say you have a WMA that you want to explore. You could begin at random, sweeping streams from one corner of the property to the other, hoping to get lucky. But it would be smarter to set some criteria first—focusing on the needs of your particular quarry—then search only those places that have the best chance of holding quality fish. For example, brook trout in the Southeast tend to hold on only above 3,000 feet of altitude. Meanwhile, transient species such as running rainbows and browns often stage in creek mouths as they run up tributaries to spawn. Browns like deep holes and eddy swirls—even in little creeks. Depending on what you're chasing, you want to go straight to these high-probability spots and leave out the ho-hum water. This is where Google Earth comes in.

Obviously, you need to download the program first. It's free and can be found at earth.google.com. Once downloaded and installed, finding your target property is easy: Just type the nearest town in the search bar and "fly" to the area you plan to search. Simple tools let you zoom in and out and move around. The program's a lot of fun to play with, even if you don't have a particular goal yet. You'll probably notice that some of the remotest areas have lower-resolution aerial photos.

That's one big reason you're going to want to beg, borrow, or steal a GPS unit. Google prioritizes urban areas for updating its photography, so some remote areas are only sketched in. But with a GPS, you can use Google Earth to embellish your own extra-detailed map. Suddenly what was a nifty way to look at your water from above becomes a robust exploratory tool.

GPS units such as those made by Garmin and Magellan can locate themselves at any particular time, based on satellite signals. They also can record "tracks," which are a series of waypoints that indicate the position of the GPS as it is carried down a trail. When you get back from a hike with your GPS, you can download tracks to Google Earth, complete with things you've marked on the way: "Saw a Huge Trout Here" or "Angry Badger—Do Not Approach".

Even better, tracks are time-stamped at routine intervals. Conveniently, digital cameras also time-stamp their photos. Thus, it's easy to look at the time stamp of a GPS unit track, then compare it to the same time on a digital picture, and know exactly where a particular shot was taken.

Doing the Legwork

Let's assume you're armed with a copy of Google Earth, a GPS unit, and a digital camera. You've thought about the criteria you need to find, say, brook trout. North-facing slopes of the southern Appalachians at elevations over 3,000 feet usually hold brookies, so I start a search on my local WMA with that knowledge. Using Google Earth, fly around and locate some areas that could hold the trout you seek, and then mark them with a "placemark."

Placemarks (made using the pushpin tool) are spots on the map where you want to make a note, pin a picture, or otherwise identify something. At first, you'll use them to note the likely-looking spots to check on your hike. Later, you'll use them again to show the details you uncovered on the ground and to keep track of a particular river (more about that later). For details on making placemarks, see the sidebar. Once you've stuck a few placemarks to your map, you'll want to export them to your GPS unit to check out in real life. You can either input them in the GPS by hand using your unit's interface (fastest for just a couple spots), or export your Google Earth file directly.

Unfortunately, GPS is new enough that there are no file format standards. You'll need to convert your Google Earth placemarks (saved as a KML file) to your GPS unit's file format in order to move them onto your unit's memory. My Garmin GPS unit came with its own program, called MapSource. I convert Google Earth KML files to GPX files (the Garmin format) using a free program (appropriately) named KMLtoGPX. Then I load the waypoints in Garmin's MapSource and export them to my GPS unit.

Once your placemarks are plugged into your GPS unit, you have to do the legwork. Prime fishing spots aren't always obvious from the air, even with the advantage of Google Earth. So go to your first likely spot, and hike the watershed. Turn on your GPS unit and record your track so you can download it when you get home. (Importing from a GPS to Google Earth is much easier.) Use the placemarks you made in advance to go straight to the best-looking areas. Take pictures of the good spots, and obviously wet a line to see what they contain. The key here is not to fall in love with any particular location; you want to walk as much territory as you can to uncover as many gems as the area may hold.

At the end of the day, take your camera and GPS unit home and plug them into your computer. To import from a GPS unit to Google Earth, click "Tools/GPS." Download your tracks and save them in a folder in "My Places." I name my folders by watershed, and then subdivide them by date for specific hikes, to avoid confusion later.

Now you've got a map of your path visible in Google Earth. Since the track has an accuracy of about three feet, this gives you a super-precise view of the trail or creek you hiked, even if the satellite image was obscured by trees. After a few hikes, you'll build the most accurate trail map possible, which only you will have. Better yet, now you can use the Placemark tool to its full potential.

Personal Records

When you're covering a large property, Google Earth provides you a leg up for your initial sweep. By continuing with different hikes until you've covered every likely spot (those that meet your criteria for the best or biggest fish on the property), pretty soon you'll have hit all the best trout holding lies on the entire property.

When you combine the power of a super-accurate trail map with a highly selective journal, you create your own guide to finding the best fishing in the shortest time. Remember that pushpin you placed on your map before your hike? That marker has the ability to become a full-fledged journal entry. Further, the pictures you took on your hike can be inserted into the placemark to improve your memory of the spot or to illustrate it in different seasons. Compare the photos' timestamps to the time recorded on your track for any pictures you can't immediately place on the map.

Why go to all the trouble of cataloging everything you know about a river? Because it will help you find bigger fish more frequently; the biggest fish in a given stretch of water will almost always occupy the same handful of locations. So whenever you catch a big fish, mark the spot. Also note the weather, stream flow, and other relevant conditions. If you do this every time, pretty soon you'll notice some serious trends on your map. Some places just fish better than others, yet many of us waste our time plying marginal water rather than marching straight to the best locations. (And on a big piece of public property, the chances of most of those locations being unfished is very high.)

Plus, rivers are changeable. Water level, time of year, timing of fish runs, hatches—all of these factors affect the quality of a given fishing location. A prime holding lie in July might not have anything in it in October, which is why so many of us keep fishing journals. So, the best way to really get to know a watershed is to visit it on multiple occasions. As you return to certain spots across the seasons, your catalog of facts and knowledge about those locations will grow.

Over time, these placemarks will accumulate and you'll have not just a perfect trail map, but a living, breathing journal. I include everything from weather data to stream flow, the numbers of fish caught, and flies used to the people I fished with and the time it took me to get there in my placemarks. Even better, these maps make an excellent way to collaborate with friends who are also searching the same area.

Further Advantages

Google Earth can be useful in other ways, as well. Saltwater guides use the program to scout distant flats—the color change indicates water depth to those who know what they are looking for. After major storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, Google Earth is often the first publicly available tool for seeing how conditions (such new channels or sand bars) have changed. Lake-based anglers also can benefit from Google Earth, particularly for transient species such as stripers, which tend to follow the bait around the lake. One tournament angler meticulously recorded and flagged where he found stripers in an Arkansas lake over the course of three years; at the end of the period, he told me his success rate in motoring right to the blitz on any given day had jumped from about 50 percent to 80 percent.

Even tailwater anglers can benefit from the Google Earth-GPS combo. Most GPS units have proximity alarms, which will alert the user when a certain target grows close. Since tailwaters are prone to massive fluctuation in water levels, stream topography—which is obvious at low water—becomes invisible when the dam is running water. Big browns tend to feed when the water is running, especially around drop-offs and other structure. For an angler floating at high water and crashing the banks with streamers, there's a huge advantage in having a GPS pre-loaded with prime locations and set to beep you when you're on top of a cut or shelf.

Whether you're interested in searching large chunks of public land for out-of-the-way fish, or you want to become intimately familiar with a piece of water you'll be fishing a lot, Google Earth (and a GPS) offers opportunities anglers a decade ago just didn't have. Even better, a fully annotated Google Earth journal can be a beautiful thing to behold, letting you relive past fishing triumphs "on the ground" while flying from location to location, planning for next year's outing. Few tools to come along in recent times have such potential to radically change the way we fish—if you haven't already staked your claim, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Zach Matthews is the editor of The Itinerant Angler, www.itinerant angler.com, and a frequent contributor to American Angler.