It’s a few months on from my last post on AI in fly fishing and things have continued to evolve at pace. Here I’m going to delve into how we can get the most out of historical fishing logs to benefit our future fishing.
I’ve previously talked about some benefits of fishing logs and modernising them. Moving forward you can use an AI like chatGPT to process a digital version of your fishing log (for example as a PDF), then ask it questions to gain better insights from your previous fishing to help you in future.
One example of this might be to ask “what 3 things are most common when I catch fish?”. Another example approach is to ask a version of “I’m fishing venue, during month, what techniques and flies should I consider based on previous catches?”.
My experiments with this so far, indicate significant potential to me as both an angler and coach. Most of the results are no surprise, but sometimes I’ve found a different way of looking at something, like organising fly boxes to flow through the season. This reduced the amount of patterns I carry by 30-36% making it easier to locate and select what to use. Something like this just helps me make better and faster decisions, by directing me to exactly where I need to look and limiting choice.
The above are only examples, this can be applied too much, much more. But what if you don’t keep a record of your fishing, what use is this? In addition to maybe encouraging you to keep some records going forward and indeed indicate what records may be most useful, you can also use other documentation. For example, some venues publish fishing reports and catch records. You could pull as many years worth of these as you like/are available into a document and analyse it as described for the personal fishing log above. It may help you decipher times, conditions and techniques among other things that are more successful.
It seems the options to improve right now are limited only by our own imagination and desire to do it. I hope this helps and inspires you!
Have fun!
SJY