Exact GPS point

As well as choosing a place (a water or a location), you can mark the exact point where you caught the fish. This is the precise cast: not just which water, but where in the water.

You can set a point on catches, fishing sessions and observations. The field looks the same in all three places.

If you log fish while a session is in progress, each entry also gets its own point automatically. Each fish is then shown where it was actually caught, instead of at a single point for the whole trip. This is useful when you are drifting or trolling.

How to set a point

The exact point field is below the place. Tap it, and the app uses your current GPS position. The point is saved together with the entry.

The point field appears once you have chosen a place. If you are in a boat and do not know what the waters are called, tap Use my location first: it finds the place without you needing to know the name.

The place lookup answers as soon as it knows which water you are standing by, and it needs less precision than a point does. If the GPS happens to be really sharp at that moment, you get the point for free straight away; otherwise you set it with the point field, which waits until the position is accurate enough to be worth saving.

When the point is set, it says Exact point set along with how accurate the position was. With Update you fetch the position again, and with the cross (Remove point) you remove the point.

The button for setting the point with the GPS is only there when the entry is about now, that is, when the time is within half an hour of now, or while a fishing session is in progress. If you enter a trip afterwards, the phone is wherever it is now and not where you were fishing, so you set the point on the map instead, see below.

If the point is far from the place you have chosen, the app tells you. It is only a warning, and you can save as usual. It catches the most common mistake: that you correct an old catch at home and set the point while the phone is lying in the living room.

Choose on map

If you enter a trip afterwards, the app cannot use your location as the answer to where the fish was caught: you are probably at home. Use Choose on map instead. The map opens with a crosshair in the middle of the screen, you move the map to where you were fishing, and tap Use this point. Along the way the app shows which water you are aiming at.

Inland, the crosshair must be on the water, that is, on a lake or on the line of a river or stream. If it is on land, the app tells you and the button waits until you have moved it out. This prevents a catch from ending up in a field or in the woods, both in your own journal and in the shared data.

Rivers have some leeway, and how much depends on the size of the river. A river is stored in the map as a single line in the middle of the channel, however wide the river is, and most people fish from the bank. That is why the app accepts the crosshair being some distance out from the line: about 150 meters in the very largest rivers like Glomma, which runs in several channels with gravel bars in between, 90 meters in a large river, just under 60 in a medium-sized river and 25 by a stream. You can then put the point where you actually stood, on the bank or out on a gravel bar, instead of in the middle of the current. The marker itself is placed on the river when it is drawn, so the map looks right either way.

Along the big rivers the app also does not warn about "land" until you are well outside the river corridor. The line tells you where the river runs, but not how wide it is, and on a large river a quarter of the width lies further from the line than the app can confirm. There it is more correct to let you decide than to claim that you missed.

Along the coast the rule is looser, and that is on purpose. The map data for the sea does not cover the heads of fjords, narrow sounds or the open sea, so the app cannot know whether you are on land or at sea. There it lets you decide for yourself.

In Sweden the map data is somewhat coarser for the smallest lakes and streams, so there the app accepts a point up to about a hundred meters from the water's edge.

The map picker does two things, depending on which button you came from. If you tap Choose on map under the place, the map sets both the place and the point, so you do not need to choose the water first. If you tap it under exact point, and you have already chosen a place, the map only sets the point and leaves your place alone. If you have chosen the point on the map, the field says Point chosen on map.

The latter is the way to go along the coast. The map does not know every fjord head or the open sea, so if it does not find the place where you were fishing, search for it or fill it in yourself first, and set the point on the map afterwards.

If you have already saved the entry, you will find Correct position on the catch, the session or the observation. It opens the same map, and the crosshair is where the point is today. If the entry does not have a point yet, the map opens on the water it is marked with, so you do not have to find your own way there.

Add straight from the map

If you hold your finger on a water for a moment, the app asks whether you want to add a catch or an observation there. The form opens with both the place and the exact point you pointed at already filled in.

This is the quickest way when you are standing by the water and know where the fish came from. The menu requires you to hold for a short moment, so that it does not pop up every time you drag the map, and it does not appear if you hold on land.

The points on the map

Exact points are shown as green markers on the map. If there are many points close together, they are grouped into clusters that you can zoom in on. If a catch does not have a point of its own, the map neatly falls back to the place (the water) it is linked to.

If you fish from the shore, the GPS point is where you stood, that is, a few meters up on the beach, the jetty or the rock. On the map the marker is then placed just off the shore, on the water side, so that it does not look like a catch on dry land. Points in rivers and streams are placed on the line the river is drawn with, straight out from where you stood, never further up or down the channel. What is saved on the entry is still your position as it was.

Tap a point

If you tap a green marker, the panel tells you what that particular point is. If you have fished there only once, you see the trip or the catch straight away, with a button that takes you right to it. If you have been there several times, you get a list of the trips and catches at the point, newest first. Tap a row to open it.

Because points that are close to each other are merged into one (about 20 meters), it is quite normal for one point to hold several trips. Special catches are not shown as separate rows, they are counted in the fishing session they belong to.

The marker that gathers entries without an exact point shows the same list.

Show a catch or session on the map

On a catch or fishing session you will find the Show on map button. The map then opens with only the one point the entry belongs to, and a card that shows the species, weight and length (catch) or the duration, number of fish and species (session). Your other markers are hidden while the card is open, so you can clearly see which point it is about, even when you have fished several spots in the same water.

If the entry does not have an exact point, the marker is placed on the water's fixed point, and the card tells you that the location is approximate. From the card you can open the catch or the session again, or tap Show the water for the usual information about the water.

The map image on the entry

If you open a fishing session, a catch or an observation, there is an image of the area at the top of the card with the place name. It is an aerial photo, the same one you see in the small image on the session cards in the journal, and how large an area it shows depends on what kind of water it is:

• Lake: the whole lake fits in the frame, so that you recognize its shape. The image is the same for all trips to the same lake, wherever in the lake you were fishing.
• River and stream: a close-up around the point, about one kilometer across. A river can be tens of kilometers long, so an image of the whole channel would not say anything about where you were.
• Sea and coast: a wider view around the point. On the coast it is the surrounding landscape, the islets and the approach that tell you where you were.

If the entry has an exact point, the point is in the middle of the image for rivers and the sea. Without a point, the place's fixed position is used.

The point is also marked with a green dot on the image, the same green color as your fishing spots have on the map. In a lake, where you see the whole lake, it is the dot that shows where in the lake you stood. If the entry has no exact point, the image is shown without a dot.

The image is drawn the first time you open the entry and is saved on the phone, so it is there next time too, even without coverage. While it is being drawn, there is an empty area where the image will be, and the image fades in when it is ready. If you have no coverage the first time, the water type icon is shown instead, and the image appears when you are online again. The images share storage with the map: an area you have looked at on the map is also saved for the images.

The conditions are fetched where you stood

The point also decides where the weather, the water temperature, the tide and the water flow on the entry are fetched from. Without a point, the app only knows which water you were fishing in, and a water has one fixed point that has to represent the whole of it. In a long river or a large sea area, that can be tens of kilometers from the fishing spot.

The water flow and the water level are the clearest example. If you fished at Embretsfoss in Drammenselva, the fixed point is down in Drammen, and there is a gauging station right next to it. You then got the figure from there, twenty kilometers further down and after several power stations, instead of from Døvikfoss a few kilometers away. Now the station nearest to where you actually stood is chosen.

The same applies to the other figures. The weather is fetched for your part of the water, the sea temperature for the arm of the fjord you were in, and the tide for your part of the coast. The water temperature in fresh water is an exception: it is calculated for the whole lake, from the depth and the size of the water, so there the figure is the same wherever in the lake you were.

Your point is not sent

The gauging stations are stored in the app with their positions, so the station is chosen on the phone. The only thing that is asked for is the reading from the station you ended up with.

The weather, the water temperature and the tide, on the other hand, have to be calculated elsewhere, and then the request has to contain a position. Your point is rounded to about one kilometer before it is used, in the same way as in the shared species data, so it is the grid square and not the fishing spot that leaves the phone. This costs no precision: the weather model calculates in one kilometer squares anyway.

If the source finds nothing for the square, for example because it is so close to land that the ocean model does not cover it, the figure is fetched from the water's fixed point instead. The entry then gets the same figure it would have had before, instead of being left empty.

Old trips are corrected when you open them

Trips you logged before this came in have the figures from the water's fixed point. They are corrected the first time you open them, as long as you are online. The water flow is fetched from the right gauging station, and the weather is fetched again for where you stood. The correction happens on the phone, not during syncing, so you need to visit each entry, but after that the corrected figures carry over to your other devices.

Two things are worth knowing. The weather is only corrected when the point is more than two kilometers from the water's fixed point, that is, in the long rivers and the large sea areas, where it actually makes a difference. If the point and the fixed point are a few hundred meters apart, the weather is the same, and then we leave the entry alone. And since a weather forecast cannot answer for a day that has passed, the corrected figures are fetched from the weather history. That is the same source used by trips you enter afterwards.

Privacy

IMPORTANT

The point follows the visibility choice you make on each entry. If you choose Friends, friends can see it. If you choose No place or Private, no friends see the point.

The fishing sessions themselves are never shown to friends, so no friends see the point on a session.

In the public feed the point is never shared, not even when you share it with your friends.

If you share species data, the exact point is never shared. An approximate point is used instead, rounded to about 50 meters, and the rows have no link to you. This applies to catches, observations and fishing sessions. The purpose is that species can be shown in the right part of a water instead of being smeared across the whole of it.

Entries you made before point sharing existed in the app never share the point, whatever you choose now.

To protect your favorite spots even further, points are "snapped" a little (about 20 meters) when they are saved, so that the very exact position cannot be read out of the data.