Using Satellite Imaging to find spots

I recently posted a thread with an image I had pulled off of Google Earth asking if anyone knew what was there. I also posted a nearly identical thread on another forum. While it was kindly answered here on GON, it was met with nothing but ridicule on the other forum. Mostly just telling me that if I would just pull up the charts I could see for myself. Well, the charts give some depth readings, but not much else.

This got me wondering if anyone uses this method of locating likely fishing spots down here in the salt. I have been doing this for years in fresh water, whether it be on lakes for bass and crappie, or even on trout streams and rivers. I have found it to be a wonderful tool for pre-scouting water I have never been on before. It even helped me win a very nice tournament pot on Clarks Hill lake when I was able to locate secondary coves with small creek channels in them and concentrate on them rather than try every cove I came accross or just judge them from what I could see on the bank as I rode by.

Admittedly, this is probably not going to be a tool for use far offshore, but you will be surprised what you can find for inshore or shallow water fishing. For instance, this image led me to a field of oyster beds on a mud flat. Having fished it two years running in May, I can attest that speckled trout and redfish both come up into these beds as the tide rises. You will notice a nice little channel meandering across it. They use this path to get on it and to come off of it. As the tide drops lower, the will sit off in deeper water and wait for the bait to be washed out that little channel. As I launched at near high tide the first time I was there, I would have never noticed it, or thought about that little channel, had I not seen it on the satellite images before I ever made the trip.



Another is here. This side creek channel drains a very large area of sparse grass flats and creates a great ambush point with the outgoing tide. There were redfish here both times I went.




Here is a pretty good video by a guy who used to do the same thing with flyovers. Today he uses Google to find wrecks, rock outcrops, even holes created by practice bombing runs (Bet you a dollar none of THOSE are on your old bathymetric charts!)



Yeah, it's not the way it's "always been done", but then most of us are not using the sextant any more either. Give it a try. It's a great tool for unfamiliar waters.

Great info! A+

That's awesome. Don't worry about those yahoos. People are full of themselves when it comes to fishing. Thanks for sharing your ideas. This is how we all learn

I use goggle earth all the time to try new spots. Matter of fact there's one spot that I have the google earth image screen shot on my phone because that's the only way I can navigate the narrow channel.

Riplukelee said:

I use goggle earth all the time to try new spots. Matter of fact there's one spot that I have the google earth image screen shot on my phone because that's the only way I can navigate the narrow channel.

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Riplukelee, are you using a fairly modern gps/sonar on your boat? If so, there is a good chance you can create a point to point route. You can get the coordinates for each point of the route off of Google Earth.

Yep, Google Earth is the best thing since sliced bread. I use it all the time.

I use it to see what areas look like at different tide levels scrolling through the historical images. Very helpful.

You would be surprised how good earth is for offshore, you can overlay a lot of data in it. But do now let yourself get stuck on earth, inshore differences can be seen differently with bing maps and mapquest as well as the photography is different 99% of the time. Opencpn is useful to mark things from NOAA charts and then import the gpx data. Also, open street maps is an excellent source of imagery as well.

doomtrpr_z71 said:

You would be surprised how good earth is for offshore, you can overlay a lot of data in it. But do now let yourself get stuck on earth, inshore differences can be seen differently with bing maps and mapquest as well as the photography is different 99% of the time. Opencpn is useful to mark things from NOAA charts and then import the gpx data. Also, open street maps is an excellent source of imagery as well.

Click to expand...

I do like Bing for the Arial view, actually taken from a plane. It can sometimes be clearer. Terraserver has very sharp Images, but to really zoom in you have to buy a subscription and it's expensive.