Top Google Earth Tips to Maximize Your Fishing Success

Google's free satellite imagery program, Google Earth, is especially valuable to anglers all across the world. Take full advantage of the array of features offered through Google Earth to discover new fishing locations, near and far, helping maximize your fishing success.

For starters, be sure you have downloaded and updated to the latest version of Google Earth. Installation is fairly simple and the built-in Google updater usually keeps your program to the latest version (as long as a firewall is not blocking it). After installation, start the program and allow it to connect to the Internet. Then, using the built in controls, zoom in to your area of the world on the globe. Clicking and scrolling with the computer mouse allows you to move the image and zoom in or out.

On the satellite imagery view, find your area and start scouting for fishing locations. At first, it can be difficult to recognize bodies of water from grass, forests or other terra. With practice, you'll spot them right away. Take a look at some of the local parks with lakes you are familiar with, so that you can see what lakes, ponds and streams look like. Stagnant water, especially during the summer when algae growth abounds, will usually look very different from deep, coldwater lakes.

Once you have found a body of water you are interested in, start scouting, by zooming in and out, for access. Find out if the land is public or private and where the nearest vehicle parking is. If you aren't sure about public access to the water, take a screenshot of the area in question, and email it along with your query to your local parks department. They usually will answer questions about such fishing matters in less than a week, at least from what I've experienced in my searches for new fishing spots.

Before heading out to fish a new place, zoom as far as in possible (while maintaining adequate image resolution) and locate good bank fishing spots (clearings on the shore), places to launch a boat or kayak, docks, piers, fallen trees and logs, riprap and rocks, and any other useful cover fish may be hiding in. It might even be useful to print the satellite imagery as a map to remind yourself of where good fishing spots might be. I have printed off Google Earth imagery as a guide for hiking into places, especially when I can't find the pond easily (thick brush or no path making it hard to find without any guidance).

Also, especially in hot, dry areas like Southern California, consider the likelihood of the pond you are looking at drying up during warm weather. Sometimes, Google Earth can be deceiving, showing water where there often is just a mud bed or marsh. To avoid driving out to a new spot only to find that it is dry, use the awesome "historical imagery" tab on Google Earth, under the "view" button. Once this slider is shown, you can scroll through satellite imagery taken from several different years, often during different seasons. This is especially useful for spotting those ponds and lakes that dry up from time to time, thus lowering the likelihood of finding good fishing opportunities in them.

You can add "pins" to interesting locations you find on Google Earth, along with personal notes about fishing trips to those areas. Definitely take advantage of this and use this feature to help keep track of the different spots you find. Also, use the "user images" of certain locations to help you get close-up photos from others of the area. This feature is not always useful, as user-submitted photos of different areas are not all over the map, but occasionally they'll help you learn more about an interesting fishing spot than you would from the top-down view.

Google maps can be accessed while on the run, unlike Google Earth. While I prefer to use the latter, sometimes Maps is the only one available at the moment. Switch to satellite view to find the best locations, as the default "map" view makes finding good bodies of water difficult. Keep in mind that Google Maps also lacks the historical imagery function that Earth has, and it is harder to detect if a pond is full of water year-round or not. A useful feature of Maps is Street View, although this is not always an option for ponds and lakes located far away from busy metropolitan areas. Street View gives you a 3D panoramic photo of the area in question, taken from the viewpoint of cars on the road.

While Google Earth is not an especially demanding program in terms of computer resources required, it does require an active internet connection to work properly. Your locations and pinpoints are saved to your computer (from my understanding), but the actual satellite data and imagery is downloaded from the Google servers each time you connect.

Have fun scouting at new fishing locations using Google Earth. Remember, keep the locations you find clean, catch and release the fish for another day, and have fun!