Journal Your Journey
Journaling is a helpful exercise for most people. Putting down your feelings, emotions, trials and tribulations onto a page can help people process things that happen, or so I’m told. If I went to therapy, I’m sure they’d tell me to use a journal. But just as a journal can help you process past trauma in your real life, it can help you piece together what went wrong, or right, on your last fishing trip.
Most anglers overlook this step of writing down basic information of your day on your water. I get it, it can be hard to detail the steps of a fishing day, especially if it was a bad day on the water. Revisiting the dark thoughts of mental agony after a punishing day getting laughed at by your target fish is tough, but sometimes doing the hard work means reaping the rewards.
I keep a journal with all the basic information from a day of fishing. The main things that I always write down are: weather, water temperature, moon phase, wind direction, and air pressure. I then write down a few observations, how many fish were caught, some observations, anything of note, and that’s about it. Keeping it simple means you’ll actually fill it out after a tiring day on the water, but it contains enough information for you to start seeing the patterns.
I find this process especially useful when first figuring out a fishery. I have an unofficial rule to journal at least a year of every fishery I am figuring out, that will take you through four seasons of change and 12 months of moon phases and how they affect the fishing at each month of the year. If you’re the kind of person who can manage having a journal for each fishery you fish for all of eternity, go for it. I find that a year is enough for me to figure out the basic patterns and how a fishery responds to the changes through the year, but I have a hard time maintaining many different journals at once. But having that baseline of a year of fishing somewhere, gives you something to come back to, and having the 12 month scope can help you spot the patterns that occur throughout the year.
An example of patterns to look for when looking back at your journals, are how fish move according to the moon phases at different times of year. A full moon in January will have a different effect than the full moon in March. Cold water can be a negative in the winter, but a plus in the summer. Storm systems and the pressure changes they bring can have different effects depending on duration and strength, but can also be predictable once you’ve looked back at similar storms in the past at similar times of year. The point being, noticing patterns in the fishing in the past, can help you prepare for the fishing in the future. The more prepared you are, the better decisions you’ll make.
Each fishery has a unique way in the way fish react to changes in the weather, moon phase, pressure changes, etc. There are general rules about fishing that you can read about or learn about from others, but if you want to truly excel at a certain fishery or your home waters, to take your fishing to the next step, keeping a journal can be the extra something-something to help you do that. While it may not heal your childhood trauma, or reconnect you with a lost childhood friend, it can help you gain confidence in a fishery you’ve been trying to figure out. And I don’t know about you, but that sounds better than any therapy session I’ve ever heard about.