Mapping your favorite Lake

[joecnc2006]

Does anyone know or has anyone done any Lake contouring of their own?

Lets say you take an old laptop with GPS and some type of depth finder and as you drive you map the bottom of the lake, after many trips you may have a pretty good mapping of the actual lake in you fav. spots.

I'm not talking about the garmin inland lake software or the like which are not very detailed at all, and leaves allot to be desired on real world TOPO which can be to the nearest foot, instead of the nearest 10ft.

Joe

[WTL]

Doing it manually would be an intensive process that I doubt many have done by writing. Most people on here have mental maps of places they have fished a lot where they know how deep it is where and have in general a better understanding of the water they fish than the local maps delineate.

I posted a while back about the future of the computer in Bass fishing and I proposed that essentially onboard laptops in modern bass boats would very soon be doing what you described. We are probably not that far off from combining a depth finder with an on board computer, GPS reciever, weather and internet, phone and radio. I can see how software on said computer could easily mine the information read by the sonar and save it to the specific GPS coordinates, making a map of the place in detail. I'm sure a computer software whiz who could hack into a existing depthfinder/gps reciever could probably rig something up already, and I bet there is good money in it for the first guy who does a good job with it.