How to Remember Your Fishing Spots and Actually Get Back to Them
You worked for that spot. Maybe it took a season of blank days to figure out the ledge where the fish stack up on an outgoing tide. Then you come back three weeks later and the water looks the same in every direction, and the fish are gone because you are eighty yards off. Learning how to remember your fishing spots is the difference between a repeatable pattern and a lucky day you can never get back to.
This guide covers the practical ways to mark a spot and get back to it, from lining up landmarks to dropping a GPS pin, plus the details worth logging and how to keep your numbers from getting lost or leaked.
Why a good spot is so easy to lose
Water hides everything. On land you navigate by what you see. On the water the surface tells you nothing about the structure twenty feet down. A spot is really a set of coordinates plus a reason: the drop-off, the wreck, the grass edge, the current seam. Miss the coordinates and the reason is useless.
The other problem is memory. You think you will remember. You caught six fish there, of course you will remember. Then winter comes, you fish forty other places, and by spring the details have blurred and the marks you were sure of have drifted. Writing it down beats trusting your memory every time.
The old ways of remembering fishing spots
Before GPS, everyone used ranges, and plenty of folks still do because it works.
A range (or transit) is two fixed landmarks lined up one behind the other. Sit on your spot and look toward shore: line up the water tower behind the tall pine. That line runs through your position. Now find a second range at roughly a right angle to the first, say the end of the jetty against the red roof. Where the two lines cross is your spot. Two good ranges will put you back within a boat length.
Ranges are free, need no batteries, and never leave your head. The catch is they only work in sight of shore, they fail in fog or after dark, and your landmarks change. Trees get cut, buildings go up, channel markers move.
A paper logbook is the other classic. Write down the ranges, the depth, the tide, the date, and what you caught. Cheap and reliable, but slow to search and easy to leave on the dock or soak in the bilge.
How to remember your fishing spots with GPS
A GPS mark fixes your position to a few meters anywhere, day or night, in or out of sight of land. This is the most dependable way to remember your fishing spots, and there are three common tools for it.
A chartplotter at the helm stores marks and shows them on the chart. Accurate and always on, but the marks live on that one unit. If you fish from a buddy's boat, a kayak, or the surf, they do you no good, and moving them means exporting a GPX file and hoping the next unit reads it.
A handheld GPS is portable but a second device to buy, charge, and keep dry.
Your phone is the GPS you already carry, already know, and can use from any boat. The trick is capturing the spot in the moment, hands wet and fish in the box, before you drift off it. A note with pasted coordinates works but is clumsy. A screenshot of a map app loses the exact point. An app that drops a pin in a tap or two is faster and harder to fumble.
Log more than the dot
The coordinates get you over the spot. The notes tell you whether to bother. When you mark a spot, add:
- Depth and what the bottom looked like on the sounder: hard, soft, structure, bait.
- Tide stage and direction, plus the time. Many spots only produce on one stage.
- Wind and conditions that day.
- What you caught, how many, and on what.
Over a season these notes turn a pile of dots into a pattern: this ledge on the last two hours of the outgoing, that flat on a morning high. That pattern is the real prize, not any single mark.
Keep your numbers yours
There are two ways to lose a spot. Forget where it is, or hand it to someone who fishes it out. Both matter.
Losing them is a backup problem. Marks stuck on one chartplotter die with the unit. Anything you rely on should let you export your data, whether a GPX file for a plotter or a plain JSON file you keep, so your logbook survives a dead phone or a new boat.
Leaking them is a trust problem. A lot of fishing apps run a feed: your catches and locations go up to a company server, and even with the privacy settings on, your numbers now live somewhere you do not control. For hard-won spots that is a real risk. The safest setup keeps everything on your own device, with no account and no feed, so the only person who can see your honey hole is you.
One tool that does this
Wakelog is a private logbook built around exactly this. You drop a pin in two taps and tag it (Fish, Snorkel, Dive, Sandbar, Anchor), and when you want to go back, "Take me back" points a live bearing and distance to any saved spot. It points; you drive. Everything stays on your phone with no account, no server, and no feed. When you want a copy, it exports to JSON and GPX, so your marks are never locked in.
It is offline by design, so it works with zero bars, and there is nothing to leak because nothing leaves the device. It's on the App Store for iPhone now (14 days free, then $12.99 a year or $49.99 once for life). Download it at getwakelog.com.
However you do it, the rule is the same: mark the spot while you are still on it, write down why it was good, and keep a copy somewhere you control. Do that and you stop starting over on the same water every season.