Anglers hook into space how to find ocean fish ?
Back in the late 1990s, Jeff Gammon was like any other avid ocean angler when it came to going fishing and finding biting fish..
He and his son, Jason, and brother, Craig, would jump into their 20-foot Grady White and go looking. Back then it took a lot of fuel and often a lot of patience and hard work to find schools of game fish. They did more looking than fishing.
Gammon, who lives in Vista, knew there had to be a better way. That motivation led Gammon in 1999 to develop an innovative software product that did for anglers looking for fish what GPS systems did for anglers looking for locations.
Gammon, who once developed software for the travel industry, invented Terrafin SST-View, computer-enhanced sea surface temperature (SST) maps and chlorophyll charts for anglers and divers. What started as a personal quest to find productive fishing water morphed into a business that keeps Gammon, his son and his brother very busy. Using the NOAA Polar Orbiting satellites, Terrafin’s customized maps show water temperature and chlorophyll readings in a wide range of waters that include the entire Continental U.S. coastline, Mexico, Hawaii, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and the Pacific coast of Central America.
“We started off with just Southern California, and we used that to find albacore,” Gammon said. “The first charts took four hours to do, but they worked. We found that the maps put us in the right place to find fish. We put a few charts on the Internet, and fishermen loved them. I told my wife that I thought people would pay for them.”
Gammon was right. He left the software company he worked for and went into the business of producing Terrafin charts. These days Terrafin covers just about anywhere there is recreational fishing. The subscription costs $99 for a year, and Gammon said the base has grown from a foundation of 1,000 subscribers to over 4,000 around the world.
“We didn’t invent this technology, but the server providers who produced it all were very expensive,” Gammon said. “We were the first to make it affordable to private boaters.”
Terrafin also allows anglers to plot a route that they plan to use. Angler Joe Ornelas of Oceanside says he has been using Terrafin for years and that the safety aspect of providing his wife with a mapped route of his trip is worth the price of the subscription.
“It’s just a great way to let people know where you’re going to be fishing in case something goes wrong,” Ornelas said.
In addition to the safety aspect of plotting a route, Terrafin also saves anglers hundreds of dollars in fuel costs during a typical fishing season.
“It saves fuel and time,” Gammon said. “If you’re hitting more productive areas you end up with more fish in less time.”
Capt. John Grabowski said the maps not only transformed fishing for private boaters, but Terrafin SST-View is a priceless tool for captains running passenger sport boats. He said sport boat captains download Terrafin readings prior to trips and even while out on voyages in order to see the clear edges that show temperature breaks and areas that hold fish. Grabowski remembers having the Red Rooster III office send him a condensed file of a Terrafin reading of water off southern Baja once that resulted with him finding a school of wahoo that produced wide-open fishing. Gammon said that feature – showing hard edges and temperature breaks -- took his maps to another level.
“For offshore fishermen, those breaks are the real structure out there,” Gammon said.
Gammon said the service is invaluable to kayakers who fish inshore and to divers who need to find clear water. The more chlorophyll in the water, the less blue it reads on the chart. But high concentrations of chlorophyll mean more nutrients (plankton). Clean water shows up as dark blue, hence creating the edges fishermen seek.
Terrafin maps also show water along the coast in detail, and kayakers and inshore anglers use them to find productive water.
Terrafin presently is only available for saltwater, but Gammon is adding the Great Lakes as a freshwater component. Read More ...
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