Lake Depth Charts made by individuals

[Jcuralli]

The maps provided on the site are really great- especially for printing out and marking off hot spots. With all the tech everyone has on their boats these days, some of us are sure to have fish finders that also chart depths and structure. I have a buddy who's Hummingbird charts the entire lake floor with one foot contour lines and colors the structure. I'd there a place on the site for people to post their lake floor depth charts they've made while boating using finders and sonar? If so, where is it? If not, it might be useful. I'd be particularly interested in a PDF of the floors for Rock Lake, Sullivan Lake, Lake Roosevelt, Davis Lake, and Sacheen Lake (all on the East Side of the state), but I'm sure there are others interested. It would be nice to add a "user submitted charts" link to the lake profile pages.

[Mike Carey]

Interesting idea. We have one member (Lou S)that does just this, and several of his maps are in the Premium Members High Resolution Map section.
I don't know of a lot of people doing this mapping - yet. I'll be interested to see what kind of response the thread gets.

[Jcuralli]

I think it would be handy. Rock Lake in Whitman County, for example, has areas where te depth changes from over a hundred feet to one or two feet almost instantly because it has large columns of rock that jut up towards the surface. This makes it a very hazardous lake to boat on; hitting one at full speed could flip or even completely destroy your boat or just rip parts of your motor right off. That type of information might help us all be a little safer and it might help us to safely explore new areas that we might be otherwise be a little pensive about.

[rwl]

I just learned how to do this using a mapping program called ArcMap.

Once humminbird starts selling their version, probably everyone will be able to do this.

Basically you need to record your tracks from your fishfinder and put them on a memory card, then take the depth and GPS data off of the card on a personal computer and put it into the map program. I've started mapping just a few spots on Rock Lake and will work on a few spots on the Snake River, so my maps only show pretty small areas that I fish intensively.

I suppose if a lot of people recorded data for a specific lake and put it all into a master spreadsheet, a reasonable map could be made.