Prospecting a New Area

One of the biggest parts of Fly Fishing is finding water to fish, it doesn't have to be the toughest though. There's always the option to go to the local stocker pond with the other 150 people who didn't want to go through the trouble of finding a better area. There are many resources we have access to today, the most obvious one is the Internet, that is where i do a majority of my researching. You can also do research by phone, or by just asking around. Many places out in the mountains and foothills wont have a lot of information available for a couple reasons, people don't fish those water often usually, people don't like to share there secret spot, and the waters are usually fragile and cant support loads of people rushing to them.

The first thing I do when finding new water is search the area, (usually foothills or mountains) using my TOPO! map, it is a great program that shows a detailed topo map for the whole state, it shows roads around the area, i can figure out the elevation loss per mile for creeks, or try figure out what kind of access there is to the water. There's other things that this program can do that you'll just have to figure out for yourself. You can find it at any GI Joes or REI, its called National Geographic's USGS TOPO! maps or something like that, to be honest i don't remember the exact title. It is pretty expensive costing around $100.

Once I figure out what water I'm going to research, There's a few options. One things you can do is look at an aerial map of the area and the water, this can serve a few purposes such as figuring out shoreline structure, or searching for beaver ponds or large pools. Two of my favorite sites for this are Windows Local Live which isn't very good for the mountains, but it has a 3D birds eye view of areas around Issaquah, Seattle, the Eastside, and any other places in that general area. For farther out in the hills, i like to use Zillow, it has a color aerial map and has a little more coverage than Windows Local Live(which isn't live at all). This also shows all the property in the area, which is nice to make sure your not trying to fish on private property or if you just don't want any houses where your fishing.

Another web site that is very useful is http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/eap/wsb/wsb_Lakes.html it has lake surveys from the 60s 70s and 80s. The info is a little outdated but most of it is still accurate. It takes a little patients because mos tof the documents a pretty big, but it is well worth it. Washingtonlakes.com is also a good web site for looking at reports from a lake your researching, it has a few other features too, sometimes it will have a topo map of your lake, or maybe it could be one of there featured lakes in which there would be a small article about it. These web site are only good for lakes.

My favorite site is Washingtonflyfishing.com , you can put up a thread asking for info on the water, and you can search the archives of the site which are absolutely huge. They have literally millions of post in the archives. The trick is just to find the right ones that are relevant to your water. But don't worry, they have a search function that helps you so you wont spend hours going through each thread. You can also search Google, i don't think the site needs any introduction. I usually search the first 10 or 12 pages of your search. Always remember to try at least 5 or 6 searches using different keywords and quotations. The more time your willing to put into this the better results you'll have.

If the water your fishing is in the mountains, you can put up a post on watrailblazers.org asking for info on your place. Im not gonna say any names but if you can figure out who the biologist are that are in charge of the stocking and lake surveys, you can ask them though Private Message when the lake was last stocked or if stocking ever took place on the creek/river your researching. You can contact the biologist through the WDFW on the phone, this requires a lot of patients im sure but it can sometime get a much better answer on the topic, but sometimes you'll only get a short answer which you'll have to accept since there job isn't to help people.

Common sense and logic is something that you can use to prospect new areas, for example, if you know a stream holds fish, and there are no waterfalls or other barriers, you would assume that the lake higher up feeding the creek holds fish too. Another example is if you know a lake has a large inlet and outlet, it would be logical to assume that a lot of spawning takes place resulting in a lot of small fish, though this isn't always the case.