Waypoint Management?

Hey Guys,

I’ve got waypoints coming out my ears and I’m wondering what kind of tricks or tools you guys use to organize your waypoints. How do you keep track of what waypoint is for what lake and what is that waypoint? Is it a stump, drop off, crib, ect. I have a pretty good memory and a so so system I use but waypoint 1679 means nothing to me when I’m home looking things over. Any suggestion are welcome.

Thanks,

Scott Pellegrin

My starter way was to have a note book with me and write down the waypoint number and what wanted to call it. If I was by myself, I would enter in the info while fishing. Us cat guys have some time on our hands early in the year.

Now I down load the waypoint on a card and import them into LakeMasters Contour Pro. So far this has worked out well for me on the river although Contour Pro does not show snags and other under water debris. By looking at the computer software, I can figure out what I was doing there and what I wanted to name it.

Once in Contour Pro, I can group (lakes) and sort them whatever way I like.

I’m sure there’s others that accomplish this other ways and I’m interested to hear them too.

What unit are you using? I rename all mine in H/bird software and so far, working well for me. I also like the icon system. I standardized the icons I used for species

I have Humminbird units on the boat. I have used Humminbird PC but no map in the software makes it hard for me to operate. I also use Lakemasters Contour Pro and Navionics Navplanner 2. What I really wish is that the locator it self had a much faster and better management system built into it. All this data transfer stuff and renaming waypoints makes for a mountain of work when I just want to be fishing. Add to that a tournament partners prefishing waypoints and things get interesting.

I like to predict waypoints by looking at the Lakemaster and Navionics maps but that adds even more mess to the process. Do the 2011 locators have a better system built in? Mine are four years old.

If you drag and drop a waypoint gpx file into google earth you can view them there and get a good idea where they are,but you wont have any contours.

In my handheld I usually go through it after a day of fishing and go through and change the name of them to short letter and number combos. Like MS3 would be Muskie seen spot 3. Its pretty easy to remember for me. If your making cribbs just do a letter and number system. so C1. C2 etc.

What happens on your unit if you have cribs marked on a few lakes. Say you have C1, C2, and C3 on lake X and you also have C1, C2 and C3 on lake Y. My unit will not allow this without deleting one waypoint and replacing it with the other, or it adds a (001) to the name. I wish it was that easy.