13. How do I use the FishTec maps?

A. 1. This tool is 80% pre-fishing / planning behind a PC screen and 20% actual fishing. The reason for this is that when you are on the water, the last thing you want to be doing is fiddling with electronics. So plan your day in advance.

Step 1. Go have a look at the area in Google Earth. This gives you a great relation of the dam to North and other surrounding towns and roads. It also prevents disorientation when on the water, the last thing you need when fishing a tournament.

Step 2. Use any maps available, to get familiar with the dam and its names and old structure such as roads, lakes, houses, rivers, trees etc.

Step 3. Now try imagining the location of each bathymetric image in Google Earth - this is where a bit of imagination kicks in. There are 4 3D bathymetric images for each area looking at from 4 different positions, usually 90° at a time. It won’t take much to work out the areas where you would like to fish.

Step 4. But how do you mark the exact location on your GPS? The easiest way to do this is to print a copy of all the bathymetric images with the spots marked that you want to fish. (I have used 3 POI’s here to keep it simple, but you can obviously put in as many as you want) Remember that you can do this for each view.

Step 5. Now relate these marked areas on the 3D bathymetric images to the 2D contour maps included on the CD.

Step 6. Once these locations have been identified on the 2D contour maps, it is time to go to your boat / GPS. Make sure that you have saved the .lcm map file (on CD under folder ‘Load to SD Card’) to a high speed SD card first. Insert the SD card with the .lcm into the slot and power the unit up. Because you might be in Cape Town , and the dam you wish to place waypoints on is in KZN, you need to move the cursor to the approximate area. In this case, you will go to S 29°25.793 E 30°24.137, a little box will appear in the area of the mapped area. Now zoom in ….. and keep zooming in and moving around until you recognise your POI where you would like to place a waypoint.

Step 7. Once you have zoomed in to the maximum, place the waypoint on the spot by pressing the ‘WPT’ button twice. (quickly) Now repeat this step with all your other POI’s. Remember to label the waypoints clearly so there is no confusion once you get onto the water. The other thing you will notice on the freshwater maps is the letter 'H' all over the place. This letter indicates very hard bottom or rock.

See Video:-

If you don't own a Lowrance: You can still use the Lowrance emulator to create waypoints then manually copy them to your GPS. Please note that these waypoints can NOT be saved to a memory card from the emulator. See this video for instructions.

GPX Contour Maps: The other technique is to use the GPX contour file of the area (on your CD), and edit / create waypoints using a waypoint management program such as GPS Utilities, HumminbirdPC or MapSource.

***Important Notice***

If you have a pre-fishing period before the actual event, it is recommended that you drive around and over your POI’s and try become as familiar as possible with the various spots before tournament day. If your unit has sonar logging, record each section separately so you can go over these recordings on your laptop using SonarViewer® from Lowrance in the evening before the event. Further waypoints of brushpiles, staging fish, and various other POI’s can be picked up from these recordings, and waypoints created for tournament day.

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