The Next Generation of Fishing Maps

When I was at the Greater Philadelphia Sportsman's Show in February, I met Mike Gogal from Gogal Publishing at his booth.  Up until now, his company was primarily known for making print (paper) maps of regional Pennsylvania trout & bass waters.  Well all of that changed, and what he's concocted as the next generation fishing map is pretty damn cool.

This new gizmo is a little SD card that fits inside your Garmin Nuvi car GPS unit, and instantly transforms it into a fish finding machine.  What do I mean?  Say you're driving around one Saturday afternoon (& happen to have your fishing rod in the back of your truck) and get the urge to fish for trout.  With the software uploaded, your Garmin will not only tell you where the closest trout water is, but also tell you what kind of water it is (i.e. special regulations), what the seasonal limits are, and all kinds of other good info.

You can search by species

Or by body of water

and pull up tons of information

But no...the software isn't limited to trout.  That would be silly.  You can pretty much bring up any type of game fish in Pennsylvania and it will tell you where the closest water is (or how to get to a distant location).  Shoot, if you've got a bass boat, it'll even tell you where the ramp is, and if there are any motor regulations.

Yeah, I'll Go! here

The GPS Fishing Guide is really a tight piece of technology, and I'm not the only one who thinks so, as several local news outlets have also picked up on it too.  You can read their articles HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, or HERE.

The only thing it doesn't do is actually find the fish in the water for you...if you need something to take care of that, I'd suggest checking out say, Fishfinders.com.

Now for the somewhat fine print.  If this sounds a bit like a commercial, well, it kinda is.  Here's the deal.  For every sale of the GPS Fishing Guide on the Gogal Publishing website that comes from Troutrageous! using THIS LINK (or the one in my sidebar), they've decided to make a 12% donation of the sale back to my non-profit trout club, the Stony Creek Anglers (not me). Basically, it will help us feed the fish.  Actually, the club gets 12% on any purchase, so if the paper maps get you excited, use THIS LINK too.

Potential donations aside, this really is an awesome piece of technology.  I wish there was a video to show you (I'm twisting Mike's arm to make one), but believe me when I say I was amazed by how much info this thing contains.

EDIT (4/12/11 @ 11:42AM) - A video exists! See what I'm talking about below!