Colorado Fishing Blogs on Fish Explorer - Doing Homework, by Dan Swanson

It has been a very busy springtime. I’ve been fishing on Horsetooth and Carter off and on since February 26th. I spent a couple weeks working at the ski area in Steamboat and preparing seminars to presenting at the Larimer County Fishing Expo and the South Chapter of the Colorado Walleye Association in Pueblo. Along the way (the day before the Larimer County event), my disk drive crashed and I had to get my computer fixed, software installed and data from my backup (thankfully). The planned on-the-water seminar about sonar/gps use has been postponed due to the most recent snowstorm.

But now with that out of the way, we come back to preparations for the upcoming walleye tournament and guiding season. Chad already mentioned “practice fishing” at Horsetooth in his recent blog. I’ve been doing a lot of that myself. Trying different things on the lake to find what else works, what doesn’t and to find the bigger fish – not just the 17 inch males.

The walleye tournament season is underway. The Master’s Walleye Circuit held their first tournament at the end of March and the FLW Tour’s first event is underway on Lake Erie. I’m spending these snowy days doing what I should have been doing for quite a while, preparing for my first tournament on Lake Oahe the first weekend in May.

I’ve fished Oahe out of Mobridge many times but not this early in the year. Researching the seasonal migration patterns lead me to believe that fish may be in different places than I’ve caught them before. Furthermore, high water levels will flood a lot of the landscape that has been out of the water for the last several years. This creates new cover/structure opportunities.

I really like the research part of fishing unfamiliar territory. Searching the internet for fishing reports, historical and predicted water levels and studying maps are fun for me. I like taking all the information and solving the puzzle to help me put together my pre-fishing plan in order to find and catch more and bigger fish.

I bought some software (Fugawi) to view aerial photos, LIDAR images and old maps. With this software I can load waypoints and trails into my Lowrance. These waypoints mapped over the top of the contour maps in the Lowrance will give me places to start my pre-fishing.

I’ve spent several days so far just marking likely spots on these photos. Will these be the secret places that will produce winning fish? Who knows. But it can’t hurt to check them out when I get there for pre-fishing. Oh yeah, I’ll still check out all my old spots too.

Dan