Rob has spent an unreal amount of effort entering data into fishing logs (1,134 fish over 5lbs, 460 over 10 lbs), but I'm a bit more skeptical about the science. Comparing fish caught in lakes across our state introduces a mind-numbing amount of variables.

Some stats are interesting, such as moon phases, time of day, month of year, etc. These are less likely to be muddied by other conditions. Other data is more confusing. It's quite likely that flipping in 2ft on one lake is the dominant big fish pattern while throwing swimbaits in 40 feet is the dominant on another at the same time. By the the time you've dealt with all the underlying conditions, 1100 fish isn't quite enough. 500-1000 from one lake might do it.

By far the most useful data for me is simply the date each fish was caught. I often forget if that hot bite 4 years ago was, for example, in late January or early March. If I see that we caught a bunch of fish in late Jan 4 years ago I can be pretty sure I can go out this year at the same time and do good as well, assuming lake conditions are reasonably similar.

In the past this has helped me out a lot to repeat big fish bites year after year. I hope the logs will do the same with locking down sets of patterns for tournament fishing in the same way.