It's a little late for a full post, but I'll leave with a little food for thought...

Other than the obvious (if you're fishing in 9 feet of water you're probably wasting your time) this confirms popular belief of numbers shallow and big ones deeper. This has almost always held true for me in clear water. Big fish in dirty water less so. But anyway, here it is:


http://www.calfishing.com/dc/user_files/7127-Screenshot-1.gif

Now that is some extremely useful data right there!! Very interesting. Besides spawn, does time of year factor into these numbers at all?

Here's average fish depth by month. The general inference that fish are deeper in the winter and the middle of the summer does hold true. Also note that this excludes bed fish (otherwise April would be much shallower).



http://www.calfishing.com/dc/user_files/7128-months.gif

Great information. What got my attention is the change once you were at the deepest water depths. If you combine some of the numbers there is a signifigant differance:

00-06': 8.81 avg.
07-14': 9.31 avg.
16-25': 9.47 avg.
30-40': 11.65 avg.

The weights stay almost consistant until the the 30+ range then a two plus pound increase. May have to change my ways.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi. - William Faulkner

Great chart. It confirms what I have always felt, if I fish from the surface to 20 feet deep I have a good chance to catch some good fish regardless of the time of year, not to mention I HATE fishing deep.

Lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what have-yous

Nico,
I know you also do a lot of night fishing as well. Do the depths hold true at night as well as throughout the day? I have always believed that I can throw a big Wake Bait at night and get the more "active" big fish as opposed to slow rolling a Hud in 20' of water. Hope I am not asking for to much info, I just find this very interesting. Thank you for this info, that is a lot of work you put into these charts and to share it is awesome of you.
Jared

I think these numbers hold up for night fishing. I don't do much night fishing this time of year, but I can say I usually get them shallow in spring and fall, but deep in the summer. The deep summer night bite seems to hold true on several lakes I fish. Occasionally you get big wakebait fish, but even those are generally over deep water.

Oh what the heck, Ill throw my experience in here too. Shallow water makes me nervous, so I spend most of my time on offshore type stuff. Most of my biggest fish have come from fairly deep water. Doesnt matter what time of year (Ive never stuck a DD on a bed), its usually deeper than 20 feet. This includes spring (I prefer to fish for prespawn fish), especially summer, fall who knows, and definetly winter. One thing I want to point out is this. Not fishing the shoreline has hurt me in the past. While I was out dredging deep water, big fish were being caught in 1 foot of water. Just something to think about.

After looking at Nico's numbers, Tag's summary and the post about fishing logs the only thing I'm sure of is that Nico and Rob hit big fish.

I'm no stats whiz but whenever I see numbers like those posted above I wonder if there is enough information to identify patterns. For example:

(1) Are the catch numbers (either calendar or depth sorted) directly influenced the amount of time spent fishing a particular calendar period or depth? If you spend more time fishing specific depths, then the catch numbers could be biased towards those depths.

(2) Tag's summary compares average fish sizes between various depth ranges. Considering the number of fish caught, could you say that
the differences in average fish size for depths 00-06', 07-14' and 16-25' aren't statistically significant? The same question could be asked about depths 30-40' since the sample size is "only" 13 fish.

I end up with the same questions whenever people start talking about lure color as if it is the end all be all. I especially like it when people conclude that detailed color specifics are as important in say a plastic worm vs. a reaction bait. My response is usually something along the lines of how did they know they took all other factors into consideration before they concluded that a specific factor (color - plus or minus flakes) was the key. To paraphrase smiling Don Rumsfeld ... what are the knowns, what are the known unknowns and what are the unknown unknowns?

Thanks for posting the information and hopefully there is somebody out there who lives for stats and can enlighten us about how we should look at our catch results and fishing logs.

Tim

Hey Tim,

I think the jig logo threw you for a loop. Bassbum came up with that summary. You should know by now that I am too lazy to combine statistical data to try and draw conclusions. :-)

Thanks for the excellent info, Nico.

http://www.calfishing.com/gallery/v/members/JIG-N-PIG/

Doh! My apologies to Bassbum & Tag.

I guess I need to do more than just look at the pretty pictures!

I would agree that this stuff is more "interesting" than "conclusive".

Some data is easy to draw conclusions from, but it's usually already obvious. For example, lure category and month. No surprises here:

http://www.calfishing.com/dc/user_files/7202-category.gif

http://www.calfishing.com/dc/user_files/7203-monthname.jpg

But I guess even this stuff is tightly related to the specific lakes we fish. Swimbaits wouldn't be as dominant if we were fishing lakes without trout. February wouldn't be as good if we lived in North Dakota.

However, the fun thing about fishing logs is you don't need a lot of fish for it to be statistically significant. If you see in your logs that you caught 5 fish over 5 lbs from lake X in late January when the water clarity was 4-6 feet on swimbaits in 4 feet of water, chances are very good you can go do it again.

I knew October sucked...

Nico, the lure category stuff may be obvious to you, but there are many people who will tell you straight faced that frogs, spinnerbaits, and zara spooks are all 'big fish' baits. Ok, they didn't contribute to the database, but still we do use those lures at times, and they so so seldom produce anything big.

Nico - Catch data like yours & Rob's is always interesting ... especially when you may the "knack" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw.

Rob - I haven't spent the time on the water with swimbaits that I need to but it is interesting that Snag Proof hollow frogs and the Super Spook have been my best "big" fish baits. Of course my definition of big is 4+ lbs as I grew up in MN and periodically fish for spots in AL. My PB 5-15 largemouth came on a frog in MN which isn't big by CA or even WA standards. Of course the MN state record is only 8-15. Based on this, I wonder if the "big fish" baits comment is one of those fishing myths based on tournament bass fishing expectations east of the Rockies.

Tim