Fishing diaries, or not.

[rayner]

Fishing diaries.
Are they a real help with future dalliances to the waterside, or is there another reason that makes some anglers jot down their catches?
Is there more to it than just jotting down your day's efforts?
Does a more concise entry to your diary with pictures for another reason not known to anglers who don't hold a diary?
I don't understand the idea and I'm genuinely interested, don't be mistaken there's no way I'm about to start writing down my misfortune.
Do you write your entries whilst still on the bank or wait until you get home.

 

[Bluenose]

I don't keep a diary in the truest sense but I have submitted catch reports on closed groups and they are a good way of remembering where you fished and when, as well as being a record to look back on when returning to a venue some years later.

 

[mikench]

I have a good memory particularly for blanks.

 

[theartist]

I'm getting to the stage where i'm starting to forget what rivers I have fished and where so for that purpose looking back at records or a diary helps immensely, they also remind me of places I need to revisit that are overdue. Nowadays I only log the special days or the new venues in a diary type entry. Sometimes it's just good to peruse on a wet day with a glass of something strong.

 

[rich66]

A couple of years back I wrote done every trip and drew diagrams of lakes, swims, rig ideas etc. Now I just go fish, take a few pics of the fish & pop them on FB or the “how did you get on” thread if I think they are remotely interesting.

 

[108831]

For many years I kept a record of all matches fished and all barbel I caught,since then i've packed up match fishing and barbel became a rarety,not the norm,so both records were discontinued,I have a very good memory(up till now)of all things fishing,I remember loads of sessions,even poor ones,especially when things were learnt,that is why i'm so sure about shotting patterns being important and changing equally so,not however when your catching,but when your not and think you should be....

 

[chevin4]

I started writing a diary in 1992 during the Tench heyday at Sywell. I normally write them when I get home and include blanks and well as successful sessions. I make notes of the time fish were caught weather conditions and methods bait etc. I make notes of things to do differently next time I visit a certain venue particularly if I have blanked. I have one of those pre printed diarys (fishouflage) which come in a water proof wallet in A5 format.

 

[108831]

Fish themselves are important on the day you catch em or slightly after,unless they are PB's or something particular happened,otherwise my tiny brain will have to log it for me....

 

[no-one in particular]

I kept my records on a micro soft excel worksheet, I started writing it at first then transferred it and carried on. Ideal with columns for date, weather, wind, temperatures, air pressure, bait, venue, species etc. etc; you can make the columns whatever you want. If you don't fancy trying to remembering it all or jotting it down when your fishing you can look it up on-line; most of it anyway in the weather forecast sites.
The great thing with excel is you can sort it by venue, temperature, baits whatever; there is a sort feature and it is very useful. For example if I wanted to see how many tench I caught on a certain bait and at what venue I can sort that or which month I caught the most roach, the possibilities are numerous and very helpful especially when you have built up a lot of records.

 

[peterjg]

I have fishing diaries going back to the 70s. Although they are a pain to write up they are quite useful to refer to. It brings back good and bad memories, blanks, cock-ups and the odd success. They also (sometimes) stop me making the same mistakes twice with daft ideas.

Very occasionally I do look through them and they remind me of stuff that I am sure otherwise would be forgotten. When I am too old or unable to still go fishing maybe then I will properly look at them and be able to relive good and not so good fishing adventures?

I record date, venue, sometimes the actual swim, baits, catches, blanks, basic weather and usually in the winter the water temperature (don't bother with WT in the summer) plus odd occurrences. In effect, there is loads and loads of useless information which is of no use or interest to anyone but me!

I also keep a separate list of PBs.

 

[rayner]

No not my thing I couldn't write in a diary with my left hand even if I wanted to.
If it came to remembering PBs there's no way I could, I have never weighed single fish only nets when match fishing so I wouldn't know if it was the biggest fish I'd caught.
My preferred angling is for numbers of fish not sizes of fish. I'd much rather catch smaller fish in large numbers rather than one or two bigger fish.
Once I've caught them it's to the next session without paying too much attention to past catches.
I have a pair of Avon scales that I got for our Ireland trips, we used for our knock-ups. I still have them. They don't get used now in fact, they have never been used over here.

 

[Keith M]

I used to keep a log book back in the early 1980s and in it I recorded the tackle and bait I was using and the fish that I caught, plus the weather and water conditions and temperatures and the swims that I fished. The centre pages had maps of the waters with the different depths shown on them as well just for reference.

Back in those days my fishing log was dominated with Tench, Barbel, Chub, Carp and Pike catches as I didn’t bother with recording any match weights or pleasure fishing after smaller fish.

I used to get quite a lot from these records back in the day, and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it, however I wouldn’t bother doing it nowerdays. However I still occasionally look at the maps of some of the venues showing the underwater topography that I compiled in my fishing log when I was younger, some of which have changed quite a bit over the years.

Keith

 

[Badgerale]

I don't bother, but I can imagine that making a note of temperature, pressure, river level, and the weather conditions could all start building up a picture of when the fish are biting on particular venues.

I don't bother mainly because my days free are so restricted that short of a hurricane I'm going to be out on that day whatever the air pressure is doing.

 

[The bad one]

Don't bother. I go fishing for pleasure not keeping records. What records I need to keep are in my head or on film/card these days.

 

[mikench]

How are you Phil? Compliments of the season to you and yours.

 

[seth49]

Every year I buy one of the calendars with a daily planner, and I use this to keep a record of each day’s fishing, just the venue, numbers of fish by species, and any individual large fish etc, plus weather and fishing methods, it’s handy as a reference for when I caught different species as the year warms up etc. and which methods and bait worked for them.

 

[John Aston]

Kept one since 1975. Of course I don't use it for anything very practical - does anybody really ? - but to remind myself of places and captures I'd otherwise forget. It often only needs a line or two to trigger a memory , and it's useful to provide evidence to grumpy old men (often the same age as me ) that the good old days were often nothing of the sort .

I use mine for PBs too - because even (even ?!) though I am a pleasure angler they're important. Because they just are, right?

Extraneous stuff can creep in - often crassly in my case - '11 September , River Swale , three small chub and a 7-10 barbel on meat. River coloured and high. Twin Towers destroyed . ' Cringe

 

[spoonminnow]

My preferred angling is for numbers of fish not sizes of fish. I'd much rather catch smaller fish in large numbers rather than one or two bigger fish.

 

[no-one in particular]

Kept one since 1975. Of course I don't use it for anything very practical - does anybody really ?

Because I can sort mine on excel I can enter the conditions of the day like weather, temperatures etc. and it tells me what species to fish for. I think a lot anglers miss this possibility; not whether it is worth going fishing or not but what species the conditions suit the best on the day; fish for the right species and you might catch more fish. In fact when I did this after I had built up a quite a few records my fishing improved considerably. From just going fishing and chucking and hoping I started to target the right fish for the conditions, so they can have a practical use.
I think this would be possible using notes although a bit of work required, Write down columns with headings like sunny, raining, temperatures 30-40, 41-50 etc., wind S, E, W, N and so on, it can be as elaborate as you want. Then do some sort of listing of what you caught under each heading and build up a score for each species. Then you could consult these notes before you went fishing and get some indication. Bloody long winded and never tried it, in fact just thought of it but a good exercise maybe if you have pages of notes for a winter afternoon. However, a lot simpler if you can do this on excel; it was tailor made for this sort of thing.

 

[spoonminnow]

Nice!