August 29, 2004 in Outdoors

But, so far, he still can’t beam fish up into the boat

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DEVILS LAKE, N.D. — Bruce “Doc” Samson hit the water for the Wal-Mart RCL walleye tournament this summer at the helm of a boat with a control panel resembling the Starship Enterprise.

An impressive array of electronics — everything from a laptop computer and wireless monitors to color sonar and global positioning system technology — covered the dashboard of Samson’s 20-foot Crestliner walleye fishing machine.

As technological trappings go, not even Mr. Spock or Capt. Kirk could claim bragging rights over Samson, a retired physician from Minnetrista, Minn., who left the medical field to concentrate on competitive walleye fishing.

The same could be said for the 150-plus walleye pros competing at the national level. While GPS technology, which relies on satellites to pinpoint specific locations, is a common tool in competitive walleye fishing, only a handful of walleye pros, Samson says, have interfaced the technology with aerial photos, satellite elevation charts and custom-designed contour maps.

In a game known for cutting-edge technology, Samson’s at the front of the pack.

“I’ve shown it to quite a few pros,” Samson said. “Not everyone is computer literate, and not everyone is willing to put the work into it.”

But it’s a perfect fit, Samson says, with his “Three Fs” approach to fishing — “find the fish, fish the fish and find your way back.”

“I can see myself on the lake,” said Samson, a North Dakota native. “I can see the shallow water and know where all the bays are before I get there. I have to make my time as productive as I can on a new lake.”

Samson’s foray into this latest high-tech offering resulted from a posting he saw on the walleyecentral.com Web site. Warren Parsons, who runs a small mapping company in Forest Lake, Minn., was advertising his ability to customize maps using anything from aerial photos to specific routes anglers plot with their GPS units.

For Samson, the service seemed like a perfect fit with tournament fishing. Especially on Devils Lake in North Dakota, where a series of wet years has boosted water levels by nearly 25 feet, inundating farms, shelterbelts and stock ponds and tripling the lake’s surface area to more than 110,000 acres.

To launch this merging of old and new, Parsons purchased a series of government aerial photos and topographical maps, which showed the Devils Lake area before the lake’s rise. He then married the photos and contour elevations, storing the information on a computer chip that Samson was able to load into his sonar and read with the on-board mapping software in his laptop computer.

The result, Parsons says, was like peeling away the water, mapping all of the structure and reflooding the lake.

“He looked at the first image and said, ‘Yes, I want that,’ ” said Parsons, who attended the University of North Dakota for three years studying geography, computer science and meteorology. “Bruce is ahead the curve, so it was easy to show him.”

Parsons, who left his job as a survey technician for the Minnesota Department of Transportation in 1998 to concentrate full-time on mapping lakes, says remapping lakes is a time-consuming process that involves dividing a lake into grids and recording the depth at intervals of 50 meters or less.

But the custom maps can be adapted for a variety of outdoors uses such as deer hunting and navigating lakes or rivers.

Joined by Parsons, Samson had his first chance to put the maps to use this summer while fishing a part of Devils Lake that didn’t exist just a few years ago. By following a blinking icon on the laptop screen that represented his real-time location in relation to the old aerial photo images, Samson found inundated roadbeds, stock ponds and shelterbelts.

The sonar readings confirmed the changes in depth and the identity of the structure below the water.

Coming up to an old road on the aerial photo, Samson watched the depth rise from 14 feet in the ditches to 8 feet on the top of the road. The road showed up as a pronounced hump on the sonar. On several occasions, he easily found small piles of field rock at the corners of farm fields that now are submerged.

“A lot of these old roads are gravel, and you know what likes gravel — walleyes,” Samson said. Ditto for the rock piles.

As fisheries managers across the country struggle to cope with the impact of technology on fish populations, Samson says he doesn’t see this latest mapping capability as a threat. It’s just a tool, he says, to make his time on the water more efficient. Few anglers use the technology, Samson says, adding he still has to make the fish bite.

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