Fishing Apps That ACTUALLY Help You Catch More Fish 🎣

0:00 Welcome back to the Fishing for a Reason podcast. We are excited to have you guys here. Fired up. We're trying something a little bit different today. Scott and I are recording on the same computer, so we will see how this goes. We were kind of brainstorming what would be a great conversation for us to have. And we're in the middle of actually recording our salmon academy, our online course for salmon fishing right now, which takes a lot of time and energy and effort to build out each of those modules and make sure we don't forget any of the steps that are so essential to salmon fishing success. And in that process, we actually came up with this topic idea. So, we're going to have a fun time discussing today, the top three apps that he and I use on a consistent

0:46 basis for fishing. So, that's really what our core topic is going to be about today. And we're going to dive right into that. If you tune in today, not only are you going to get a couple technological ideas for things that you can do to level up your fishing technology, but we'll give you a few tips that we use as a couple when we're planning our trip before we go fishing anytime. So, with that, we're just going to dive right in. And number one, why do apps matter? Why do apps matter? Yeah. Why apps? Rhetoric. [Music] Why apps? It makes life easier. You don't have to look at a tide guide, a book. You don't have to look at paper copies of anything. You can put everything on your phone. one-stop shop for all the

1:34 information you need to get out on the water and be successful. Yeah, it's really about efficiency. It's about using the different technological tools that you can to make yourself more efficient and effective on the water. And frankly, fishing can be an overwhelming sport, especially if you're new to it. So, why not give yourself a leg up by leveraging the technology available to you? So yeah, people want the most predictable path to success. And it what's really fun about fishing is you can't predict success. You can only use the tools given to you to make the best and most effective decisions possible before you ever leave the dock. And so apps are a really big piece of that. And as AI and other technology

2:21 continues to grow and improve, it's only going to increase our ability to find fish faster. So, it's pretty exciting and fun. And we're going to share our top three apps that we like to use. I think we'll just bounce back and forth. So, okay. What is your first top three app? Yeah. In a particular order. Okay. So, here's the funny thing is my first one is not an app. Oh, Deep Zoom is not an app. It's a website. I keep hearing rumors about maybe an app coming out. Maybe not. Make an app. But Deep Zoom's got a lot of functionality that I like. A, you can get the current. B, you can get a big snapshot of what the water's doing in your area. So, and you can

3:06 scroll and see how the current and the water is going to Do you want to show it? React. I do want to show it. Let's show it. And for those of you tuning in to the podcast, we do have a YouTube channel also. And for those of you tuning in on YouTube, we do have a podcast. So, occasionally we like to just show the thing here. You can kind of see deep zoom. Like I said, you get a big snapshot. You can pick any date you want. There's a lot of functionality that you may or may not use. I actually like the route function to be able to draw a route quickly from where you're at and say, how long is it going to take me to get say to Susha? Boom. Boom. And you double click it and it's got gives you your time or your distance.

3:54 You can put your time in there, how fast you're going. Let's see. I just say 25 knots, and then it'll tell you how long it's going to take you to get there. But for fishing and out on the water, I like to be able to look at the tides. And so, select tides. You select your tide station that you're going to be fishing around. Say you're going to go out to Cattle Point, Cattle Pass. You want to see what the tides are doing today. This little problem here, you got to delete this route. And then so you select cattle point and then you slide and you can kind of get a big snapshot of what the water is doing all day. It's big e then it starts flooding around what is that 12:36 and I believe there's all kinds of

4:40 different layers that you can add and and look at on this. You can hide the nautical charts. You can show satellite imagery, but you can basically see all your, you know, your banks. And what else do I like about this? I think that's the big things. I just like having sunrise, sunset picture is nice. Yeah, you can see that when it when the sun's coming up over on the tide chart on the right right here. So, it gets daylight at 5:14. Sunset it's after 9ine. And you could also look at the written version of that. And then you can look at the min and max. But there's all kinds of different functions that frankly we don't use a

5:26 lot of it. But I like the trips. I like to be able to build a route. I like the tides. You can also look at weather for a certain point and info. And then there's settings on the chart. Here's where you can adjust like what you see on the chart. You can declutter it a little bit and set just standard kind of settings there. So anyway, that's my number one. It's really my number one thing that I'm going to go to when I start to look at a place to go fishing is what's the water doing? And would you say that's your first stop? Generally, I it always is. Yeah, I think I always pull up deep zoom and say, okay, what's the water doing? and then jump off from there with the rest of, you know, trip planning. So,

6:12 cool. My favorite app, favorite app. Okay, if I'm gonna say number one, I'm going to rank these in order. So, my favorite app is Navionics because the chart detail on Navionics is so like when especially like when we're linking cod fishing, I can really if we we play this game where he picks a spot and then I pick a spot and we trade off and it's fun to fish new spots, especially lingod fishing. So, that's a great example, and I'll make sure to do a little screen share of it from the phone view, but I can zoom in on my phone while I'm on the water and really pick out a pinnacle that's going to be perfect for whatever the conditions are in the moment. And I haven't found another app that I can use while I'm out there and oftentimes

6:59 without service. Like there's sometimes we don't have a lot of service, but as long as the apps are downloaded, you can still use pretty much the functionality of it before you go into an out of service area. So yeah, Navionics is a favorite. I use that for looking at tides and current. We do have a example of what that looks like and I can quickly pull that up and show you. This is part of our online course that we're currently in the process of creating. So this is my phone. It's like an actual screen share of my phone. Little quick video that I made. And so like Navionics, you can see all the contours and the details. And then you can check the tides. These little rectangle shaped guys are the tide stations. So you can see what the water level is going to be doing over time by scrolling across the

7:44 graph on the bottom. Then you can zoom out and say, "Okay, cool. That's what the tide's doing. What's the current doing?" And you click these little arrow looking guys and they'll show you exactly where the water movement is and how it's going to be changing. So, that's really effective when you're out there in real time and maybe things are not as they were predicted when you were at home. You can quickly whip out your phone, pull up that app, and check. Or if you're at a spot and you're like, "All right, this is just not as productive as I was hoping it would be. You can find a spot really quickly that's nearby where you're at and check the conditions of it, the way the contours look. So, I don't know. I just feel like Davionics is a must-have fishing sidekick that I really enjoy using. And there are I mean there are pluses

8:29 and minuses to both. Deep Zoom, if you don't have internet access, you're going to have a hard time using it. Navionics, if you try to plan a route and you don't have the maps downloaded and you don't have internet access, it won't calculate your route for you because you can do a route in Navionics easily as well. But yeah, they're both uh I think they're both good apps and they get the job done. They got good info. It's interesting that they will have different currents for the same spot sometimes and haven't figured out why. Oh, the deep zoom versus Navionics. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And that's slightly a little bit. I think that kind of like bleeds into our next topic. Number two,

9:17 at least for me, a wind app is my second favorite app. Is that your second as well? Sure. Yeah. Is it though for real? Windhub.ub.ub.ub.ub.ub.ub.ub.ub.ub. Yeah. Is it your actual second favorite? It's my actual Windhub. Not podcast favorite. Windhub actual is what I use. Windhub. Well, and I think this is so important because checking wind is like a really important thing to having a great day on the water. So, you just said that sometimes Deep Zoom and Navionics won't match. Same with the Wind apps. So, why don't you dive into your favorite and why it's important that we both check. Well, I I think Windhub is a product of Windy. I think it's using the same data from Windy. And we'll just go ahead and pull it up. Okay, here we go. So, here's Windhub

10:07 again using windy info. What I like about Windhub, when you look at it on the app, all these little wind stations, it'll show the actual wind. Like right now, they're all kind of the same though. You click on a spot, it'll tell you the wind, you can select gusts, you can select temperature, preip, clouds, pressure, sea temp, and you can also, and I did sign up for the advanced version of this, you can select which model you look at. So if you run through all the wind models, you know that they they're

10:52 basically they all calculate differently and it's all kind of the way they forecast and how far apart their nodes are when they forecast. So it's interesting sometimes to go through look at some different models. I'll usually look at a couple to see if it's, you know, they're both kind of got a weather system or wind in the same general area. One of them is just a little more intense and a little bigger area. Which one do you default to? I think GFS 27 is the one that I typically default to in Windhub, but I also like the live wind station reporting that Windhub gives you. So, Saleflow is mine, my favorite

11:39 one. And I'm a very visual person. So, like similar to Windhub, I really like the way that I can see the direction on the wind and I can see this color pattern and they have a a color key. You can see down here at the bottom. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut because I don't use the I don't use the computer at all for wind. That's just to be honest, I have gotten in such a habit of using Saleflow for however many years. I think a good friend of mine introduced me to it back in like 2014, 2015 and I've used SalFlow ever since. It's a free app. You can upgrade to a paid version of it. I think it gets rid of the ads, but I'll make sure to cut to a quick little phone demo of exactly what I use. So, this is Saleflow, the app, and I do

12:26 have the free version as you can see. So, there's ads on here, but if I zoom in, like if I'm going to go fishing, let's just say I'm going to go this afternoon, it's already, if you look at my clock at the top of the at the phone, it's 3:38. So, this is showing me Thursday, June 12th at 11:00 a.m. And I would just be like, okay, so I'm going to scroll through to approximately my time. And you can see it's jumping from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. And that's really quickly telling me the wind is going to die down as long as I'm more north of the islands. and the color code. I'm just so used to this app. I've stared at it many, many hours. And then you can zoom in and get a little bit more of a detailed picture. It just takes a minute for it to upload. You can click on a location and it'll give you the actual. So you can see this latl long. It's 7

13:14 miles hour southwest wind and that was updated 19 minutes ago. So when you do click on a spot, it's telling you exactly what it is in the current moment. But you can also get a view of what the night is going to look like. So if it's going to be honking some wind, it's going to tell you, "Okay, maybe I don't go." Or if I see this purple all over, I'm like, "Oh, great. There's no wind hardly." So it can just give you a really quick visual picture of what the day is going to look like. This really comes down to just picking a model that works best for you. I really like Salow because it's quick and easy. And if I'm concerned about what I'm seeing on the app, I will do a little bit of a deeper dive. But if I jump in here and I see a bunch of purple and light blue, I'm not even going to worry about it. I'm just going to be like, "Yeah, it's going to be great. Let's go." Like wind, yes,

14:01 check. Move on. So, but if I see something a little bit more at the higher level of my comfort threshold, like when it starts getting into the really bright green and yellow area, then I'm just going to think, all right, is there an area we can hide behind an island that will be protected from that larger wind gusts coming through? So, Salow is a super fun way to just figure that out quickly and efficiently. Full transparency for me, it's simpler to open the app, look at the app, use the app as it is. I don't switch the models or anything. I've gotten very used to that app and I know what it predicts versus what is actually going to be out there. Like, I have my own sense of gauge, I guess, of how consistently accurate it is because I just only used

14:48 that one tool. And I think one of the benefits of that is again you learn your thresholds. So like when I see certain colors on the app, I'm like not going to go fishing today or there's the area that I want to be and there's the area I don't want to be. So my brain is trained on whatever model it's showing me on the default setting. But I think the super valuable piece here for Scott and I is the fact that we use two different methods. And he's actually looking at more than two. He's a charter captain, so that makes sense. You have a very meticulous method of checking weather. But I think there's a good benefit in us independently taking a look at things. I look at weather, look at winds, and then look at seaate at Noah. You take those three things and combine them. And then if Jamie looks at it and sees something different, then that's actually good.

15:36 And then it may cause us to, you know, maybe do a little deeper dive into what's actually happening out there. So what's your third favorite app? So, third favorite app. I know this is going to be a very controversial selection because they kind of they got out of the gates struggling a little bit, but I'm going to say the Fish Washington app, WDFW. They put it out. It had its early struggles. It still can kind of like be a little bit of a painful evolution because it has to update the regs every time you try to use it and if you're not in service. But I think they're getting it to a point where it's actually useful. Especially if you're fishing in areas that you're like right on the border of a fishing area. You can hit your location, you can see the

16:23 boundaries between the marine areas. You know what's open in the marine areas. And they're they're getting better at updating it real time, I think. So, I'm going to say, and I'm going to throw it out there, Fish Washington. That's my number three app for successful fishing. And Jamie probably likes she likes the regs and that's fine because she can back me up by going to the website making sure there's no emergency rule changes that have been you know implemented or placed into effect that will alter what's coming up in the fish app. So there's fish identification on that thing. There's numbers. There's a pamphlet mode where you can actually download the pamphlet and get the info from it. So maybe that's a great thing for couples to do is one person be the

17:10 fish Washington app person and the other person be the go to the website and find the thing or call call WDFW on their emergency hotline number. So I'm going with fish app fish Washington. I like it. So my third favorite app I was thinking about this because I truly use two for fishing. I use Navionics and I use Saleflow. Those are my most important two apps. And what is the most common third resource that I'm tapping into on a consistent basis for fishing? People is 100% network and hearing what's been going on, who's catching what, where people have been fishing and they haven't had success. I actually think that's more effective knowledge than where people are having success because the guys

17:57 usually won't share what's not working. So, the more details you can get about what isn't working is so valuable when you're making decisions about where to go and where to target. So, for me, I'm going to go with the I'm going to do a shameless plug. The Anglers Unlimited Gold membership is on an app and we've created a community online. It's essentially like a Facebook group but more organized as far as like you can find different content and learning. People post their trip reports, people ask questions. So, I go to our community and just check in, see who's been doing what, where they've been fishing, what has been going on actually out on the water. We have a variety of different levels out there and it's really great to always tap into your network and see what's going on. So, some people might say text, whatever that may be, I would

18:44 say your people are powerful always. So, if you don't have a fishing community, you can join a community like ours on Circle. That's a paid membership. or you can join our free group at Anglers Unlimited on Facebook. We have a free community in there as well. We don't quite share as much of our details in there as we do inside of our paid community, but another really good resource to build your people network is in person. Puget Sound Anglers is actually how we met, but Puget Sound Anglers is a community. There's 13 different chapters all around Puget Sound. Google it. You'll find somebody close in your city. go to a in-person meeting and you will make fishing friends and it's just great to have your network of fish humans. So that is our three apps each and before we sign off

19:32 today I thought we would talk a little bit more about how we split our trip planning rules. What would you say? Well, I think in most cases I like to have Jamie like look at the weather to back me up because if you have one person that is typically you will not have both have the same weather criteria or threshold to go out in. Yeah, we don't. So, I would default to the person that's got the lower threshold so that you know you can at least that can be your starting point of trying to figure out where to go because they will obviously find a place that or if you want to go someplace and the weather just doesn't look like up to their liking, then at least you get that right out in the open right away. I think

20:19 that's a good way to do it is somebody look at the tides, somebody look at the weather, then come together and say, "Hey, this looks good here. How's the weather look in the area?" And then go from there. Yep. I would definitely second that. And taking I think one of the biggest mistakes, at least I see, that couples make that prevent them from enjoying their time together on the water is just not having these conversations. So, the more that you can both be active participants in what your thresholds are, being willing to say like, I'll be honest, okay, I have fished a lot of winter derbies. I've spent a lot of time in bad weather. I don't love it. Scott can go out in way harsher conditions and still have a great time.

21:05 I can go out in the harsher conditions and convince myself to have a great time, but I'm at the point now where we fish so often that if I can just be selective and go out on a nicer day, I'm gonna. And I think that's totally fine to admit. Like having the ability to admit what your thresholds are is really helpful to making sure you just have a better day on the water. So I am the weaker link when it comes to weather and I'm totally fine with saying that. I like fishing in nice weather. It's fantastic. And I like fishing in nice weather with her. So, I love it. I think splitting the duties on weather briefing and observation and decision making is the best way to

21:51 ensure you have a good trip. Yep. Any other tips for other couples fishing together that come to mind for you? I think splitting the duties is the most important thing or the biggest thing. Yeah. and duties actually beyond just planning, but really when you're on the boat, having a clear communication of who's going to do what and just effectively executing it and reviewing it when it doesn't work because things won't work all the time. Yep. So, well, with that, those are our app preferred app discussions. I would love to know from you guys, those of you that tune in to this podcast, if you could let us know either in the comments, I know we have this in multiple different locations, whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, as well as in the podcast. If it is in the podcast, send us a quick note at

22:36 supportanglersunlimited.co. Let us know if there's a topic you want us to discuss or if you want to see more shows like this where we're reviewing products, whether it be gear, apps, whatever. Let us know what you're interested in. We would be happy to create the content for you. And yeah, thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you guys same time, same place next Tuesday. Tight lines on the Fishing for a Reason podcast. Bye everybody.