Log data- things to look for

[Bterrill]

Hi all. I've been logging my fishing data this year. Really wish I had the 20/20 hindsight to have done it all along. The intention is to compare years for trends in habitat and fishing skill.

 

I started keeping track of hours fished in July, but counted 16"+ fish and totals from 1/1/07.

 

16"+ fish YTD=11.88% of totals. 18"+ fish YTD=2.63%. 20"+=.39%

 

16 and 17's have been caught in exactly equal amounts through September 30.

 

Of July, August, and September, July had the most volitility in good fishing days. July 3.07 SMB per hour. August 3.77 SMB per hour. September 5.2 SMB per hour.

 

Notes: All fractions rounded down for measuring purposes. Ie... a 17.5=17 etc...

 

My goal is to push that 16"+ number ever higher, while maintaining or increasing fish per hour rates and fishing only rivers and streams.

 

What are some other things to keep track of that prove revealing? Weather, water temps, stream location. I could even do this on a per stream basis. Holding me back- fishing many, many streams, and possible small sample sizes.

 

Brenden

[Mike G]

What are some other things to keep track of that prove revealing? Weather, water temps, stream location. I could even do this on a per stream basis. Holding me back- fishing many, many streams, and possible small sample sizes.

 

Brenden

 

 

Sorry, the devil makes me say this. Keep track of the yardage and the par for the hole you are fishing. I would think it would be very important to know how long your casts are and how accurate they are. Also what is par for the hole? Be sure to check your scorecard carefully before you sign it and turn it in. Figure you are doing well if your handicap keeps going down.

[Bterrill]

 

Sorry, the devil makes me say this. Keep track of the yardage and the par for the hole you are fishing. I would think it would be very important to know how long your casts are and how accurate they are. Also what is par for the hole? Be sure to check your scorecard carefully before you sign it and turn it in. Figure you are doing well if your handicap keeps going down.

 

 

You laugh, but I did once count casts twice in a day of fishing. Once was with assorted lures but mostly WTD. It ended up around 48. The second was buzzbaiting and hit 62. I figure around 400-500 casts in a mostly topwater 8 hour day. 77 days out this year explains the lobster claw for right hand that I have .

[Paul Trybul]

I did so much fishing one fall I got what they call tennis elbow. It hurt every time I set the hook, opened a door, ect. Someone showed me a stretching exercise and I haven't had any problems since. You take your arm and extend it straight out with palm in the air. Take your other hand and bend your four fingers down and towards your body. Do this on both arms and before and after fishing and you can prevent elbow tendinitis.

 

You're not the only one keeping detailed fishing logs. Nature has a way of repeating itself and it helps to identify the patterns. I started keeping logs back in 2000, now I have 7+ years of data that I can refer back to. I rarely get skunked and I find myself in the right place at the right time with the right presentation often. Since I don't ice fish, it also gives me something fishing related to do over the winter months. I never kept tract of casts though, just hours fished. Does it really matter if you plug 100 cast per hour with a spinnerbait or 25 with a slider if the results are the same? I used to track a lot of things but now I just look at date, location, hours fished, temp, weather conditions, water conditions, fish caught, size of fish, lures/techniques, and if I waded, canoed or boat fished. I went from catching 200-300 smallmouth/year up to over 1400 last year fishing about the same amount of time. My fishing logs and joining the ISA certainly contributed to that success. This year I probably won't break 1000, but that is what sacrificing vacation time for a Cananda fly-in will do to your smallmouth numbers. My walleye and pike number are up though.

 

Over the winter I may cross reference moon phases versus success but I don't know what that will mean to me anyway. I fish when I get the chance regardless of moon phase.

[Rick D.]

What I add to my log is water & air temps., Water clarity, flow or level. Notable items like leaf fall covering stream, tent worms hanging from trees, algae blooms, boating/angling traffic, hatches.smells.

 

This is important for season, water quality and memory recall.

 

Remeber that you are the steward of your stream. Take notes to learn was normal and whats not.

[skjordan]

I did so much fishing one fall I got what they call tennis elbow. It hurt every time I set the hook, opened a door, ect. Someone showed me a stretching exercise and I haven't had any problems since. You take your arm and extend it straight out with palm in the air. Take your other hand and bend your four fingers down and towards your body. Do this on both arms and before and after fishing and you can prevent elbow tendinitis.

 

I developed a little tendonitis here late in the season after a week of flyfishing and paddling.

 

Your exercise gave me immediate relief of the discomfort I was having, with my arm at rest anyway. I will keep it up and see if it is a permanent solution.

 

Thanks Doc

[Mike G]

I developed a little tendonitis here late in the season after a week of flyfishing and paddling.

 

Your exercise gave me immediate relief of the discomfort I was having, with my arm at rest anyway. I will keep it up and see if it is a permanent solution.

 

Thanks Doc

 

Those symptoms are also shared with the dreaded "carpal tunnel syndrome." Since CTS is the result of irritaing the median nerve, pain can be experiences anywhere from the shoulder to the hand. Pain, tingling, or numbness can occur even when the arm and hand are at rest. The nerve is typically irritated by frequenty flexing (up down) or deviating (side to side) the wrist. The irritation is increased if pressure is included in the motion. Onvce the nerve is irritated the muscles in the forearm tend to remain slightly contracted. This of course increases the irritation into a vicious circle of more irritation.

 

I know this from studying and teaching industrial ergonomics and from suffering through bouts of the condition myself.

 

Besides casting, common causes of the condition are using hand tools that require extreme postures of the wrist along with exerting pressure, using a standard "straight" typewriter keyboard, and vertical location of items being handled.

 

The exercise you describe is a standard stretching exercise designed to relax those muscles. There are really two:

 

1. Hold the right hand out palm down. Flex wrist to point fingers down. Push on the back of the fingers with the left hand; push back with the right hand. Repeat for the left hand. 5 reps each.

 

2. Hold the right hand out palm down. Extend wrist to point fingers up. Push on the palm side of the fingers with the left hand; push back with the right hand. Repeat for the left hand. 5 reps each.

 

Other things to do:

 

1. Get a brace that will keep the wrist straight all the time. Since I have the bad habit of flexing my wrist while I sleep, it really helps me to wear it at night.

 

2. If you keyboard a lot, get an arched keyboard to remove tha constant outward tilt of the wrist. you want to adjust the keyboard height so that wrists remain straight with elbows at 90 degrees.

 

3. Take some of the load off of your right hand (if you are a righty), by switching the mouse to your left hand. I find that changing the buttons on the mouse also helps since the left hand naturally mirrors the right hand actions I am accustomed to.

 

4. If you use tools a lot, select tools that keep the wrist straight. For instance, for a drill, a pistol grip works well on a vertical surface. For a horizontal surface, a straight shafted tool, gripped like a baseball bat with the bit pointed down, would work better.

 

These are the ones that work for me so far.

 

And always get professional medical advice if the condition persists.

[Guest rich mc]

my carpal tunnel acts up occasionally . two years ago i had tennis elbow that put a damper in fly fishing. i did learn from capt tony petrrella about a fix for carpal tunnel.its simple exercise that worked wonders for me. let your arm hang at your side then rotate the hand and wrist inward, thumb next to your side then rotateback slowly. try to do this whenever you can. it has something to do with streaching the other muscles that take stress off the muskle hurting the nerve . rich

[Tim Smith]

Brenden, I don't have any tendonitis at the moment, but I am interested in your original question about log data.

 

The data you collect from your trips could include a lot of things. The problems you're going to have are standardization and quantification. Anything you can standardize and quantify can be analyzed, depending on what you choose to record in your data. Data has to be collected the same way every time to be useful, and it gets more useful when exact amounts of something are known (i.e. it's more useful to know how many fish you caught rather than if you just caught fish and it's more useful to know what sizes of fish were caught than just how many were caught).

 

The key is that to find the effect of one thing, you need to be able to hold all the other variables constant OR have a gigantic pile of data you can sift to find empirical relationships.

 

You've already a highly accomplished angler. I doubt you're going to refine your approach much more than you already have (althogh some improvement is always possible). The key benefit of your log is that someone else (the IDNR) would be interested to find out where you have success and how that matches up with their efforts to manage certain rivers. For instance, Sugar Creek has just had a trophy regulation put on it. Is it actually producing results? Careful, quantified, standardized feedback like that is pretty darn useful.

 

Secondarily, a well designed study might directly compare one lure to another one...and someone willing to keep detailed results might be a useful to a lure manufacturing company.

 

And third...it would be pretty darn interesting to be able to sift through data to find out things like "How long does it take to maximize catch rates on a new body of water." Or "Does the size of fish caught vary with the amount of river distance I cover." Or...you fill in the blank.

 

Personally, I think having numbers and species of fish, sizes of fish, time spent fishing, lure used (including color and size), temperature, discharge volume (Q) at time of fishing, water clarity and time of day would be awfully darn interesting information to keep.

[Bterrill]

No tendonitis fellas. Just one huge muscled hand and one smaller hand.

 

Tim, good points. Interesting that the last two 21"+ers were caught on a small stream in an area where in times of normal water level- wading would not have been possible. Also, each were about halfway between bridges. Wonder if that might be a good note to make?

 

I didn't keep track of smaller fish due to the impossibility of measuring them all and remembering their sizes.

 

Typically, what data would DNR folks find useful? How many fish is too small a sample size? I would think a few hundred per stream makes a better case. I do have such data on most the streams I fish.

 

The stream you mentioned has a 1 20" reg. I've found at least two more streams this year that exceed or equal it. Does the DNR know? Considering I might go 3-4 miles between public access.

[Tim Smith]

How many fish is too small a sample size?

 

The number of fish caught isn't important until you know how long it took you to catch them. So the relevant number is your catch rate, the CPUE (catch per unit effort). The real sample size issues revolve around the number of trips an individual angler takes and the number of anglers that report their data.

 

Another important thing about this kind of analysis is that the trips you DON'T catch fish are just as important, possibly even MORE important than the trips that DO catch fish. We write off bad trips and try to forget them. For statistical analysis, having some bad trips in the data set provides the basis for comparison. If you catch 50 trophy fish on every trip, you'll never learn anything from your data because apparently everything you do is great.

 

You have to fail once in a while to learn anything.

 

I didn't keep track of smaller fish due to the impossibility of measuring them all and remembering their sizes.

 

Then that's one type of information that got left behind in your particular data set. You might have good informatoin for the location and size of trophy fish, but if the IDNR wants to know the potential of your streams for 5 years from now (which is actually some pretty important information), they'll have to look elsewhere.

 

I think the location of trophy fish relative to bridges IS interesting. I assume you're inferring that the big fish set up ranges away from places they're likely to encounter humans/anglers. If you can accurately collect that data, go for it.

[Jack T]

I had torn rotator cuff/ upper right arm tendon/shoulder surgery last March follwed by four months of physical therapy, shoulder still a problem and can take several years to over come the discomfort associated with the shoulder, few times I've been out fishing/casting I have known it next day, each morning and during course of day I do a stretch exercise where I extend the arm out horizontally and rotate/twist the hand in a rapid motion back and forth, sounds from my shoulder seems like I have an old clunker located there,[ which I guess Iam at seventy four ] just an add on for those who may be experiencing shoulder area problem.

[Bterrill]

I had torn rotator cuff/ upper right arm tendon/shoulder surgery last March follwed by four months of physical therapy, shoulder still a problem and can take several years to over come the discomfort associated with the shoulder, few times I've been out fishing/casting I have known it next day, each morning and during course of day I do a stretch exercise where I extend the arm out horizontally and rotate/twist the hand in a rapid motion back and forth, sounds from my shoulder seems like I have an old clunker located there,[ which I guess Iam at seventy four ] just an add on for those who may be experiencing shoulder area problem.

 

Er, sorry about your injury. Doesn't have a whole lot of relevence to collecting fishing log data. Ironic that I started this thread to avoid hyjacking another thread and it gets hyjacked itself .

 

Tim, I keep score of every trip. The one we went on is about as bad as it gets. Fishing has been remarkably consistent. Obviously, the data is no good if you throw out the bad ones. September data was thrown off by a 5 hour 4 fish effort during a cold front.

 

I don't have GPS, but it would have been interesting to see where the biggies were more common. Ie... how far into the wade or float.

[Guest Don R]

77 days out this year explains the lobster claw for right hand that I have .

 

You're lucky we didn't start talking about lobsters

[Jack T]

Er, sorry about your injury. Doesn't have a whole lot of relevence to collecting fishing log data. Ironic that I started this thread to avoid hyjacking another thread and it gets hyjacked itself .

 

Tim, I keep score of every trip. The one we went on is about as bad as it gets. Fishing has been remarkably consistent. Obviously, the data is no good if you throw out the bad ones. September data was thrown off by a 5 hour 4 fish effort during a cold front.

 

I don't have GPS, but it would have been interesting to see where the biggies were more common. Ie... how far into the wade or float.

Paul T made reference past article on his Tennis Elbow from excessive casting, so I thought I would add regarding my shoulder in case some one was having similar problem, not much I can do with my other disability, I wear a prothesis.