You read about the big name professional anglers doing it all the time, but rarely hear of other anglers, tournament or especially non-tournament, doing it. I’m talking about flying over lakes. It’s not that expensive when you consider how much it costs to travel to a new (large) lake and spend days, weeks, or longer (if at all) learning what you can in a couple hours flying over.
Underwater structure and objects immediately become visible from the air…and contours easily overlooked at water level really stick out. I’ve flown about a dozen lakes and figure I saved myself untold months of searching empty water in the process.
This has been especially critical when you consider how large my usual stomping grounds are – the Great Lakes. Talk about some water to search. In the past, I flew Lake Erie – Bass Islands since I’d never been there. I took a camera, notebook and portable GPS. I marked many spots and recorded the sites with the camera. One in particular looked very promising. Derek immediately singled out the picture and said we had to visit there one of our first stops.
We pulled up directly on the spot using the GPS coordinate. It didn’t look much different than surrounding water at first, but (and this is the truth absolutely) we caught 7 keeper smallmouths in 7 casts. Over the years, that spot has produced lots of bass for us.
This type of situation has occurred numerous times on other waters since. I won’t go into further detail here since I only wanted to pique your interest. Eventually, I plan to add an in-depth work on this topic to my articles page.