Whenever I find something that helps me catch more crappie I love to share it. Especially when it saves me lots of time. Fishidy is one of those things. It is insanely useful and needs to be a tool in your toolbox. So, here is my Fishidy review.
(BTW I don’t receive anything from Fishidy for writing this)
Contour (aka depth) Maps
Fishidy provides two things that are immensely helpful for fishermen, especially for crappie fishing. The first is access to just about any contour map of any major lake/river in the U.S. When you are trying to locate crappie, a contour map of the lake is one of the first things you should find. It can help you to target those specific locations crappie tend to hold to during different parts of the year. Fishidy is the only website/app I have found that contains high quality contour maps with satellite overlays from around the entire country in one place. I usually end up digging through a handful of websites only to find a low quality map. Fishidy makes finding a map super quick and painless.
Fishidy currently has maps for over 20k freshwater and 180 saltwater waterways. So, the contour map feature is really only available if you fish on a major waterway. Many smaller lakes and waterways don’t have data (yet).
A Fishing Social Network
The second thing Fishidy offers is a fishing “social network”. How is this helpful you ask? Well it’s essentially like asking all the other fishermen in the area what they caught, where they caught it, and what they used to catch it. Now I’ll admit, outside of Wisconsin, I don’t think Fishidy has hit its stride yet with providing a useful amount of fishing reports (especially for crappie). But I do think it’s a great start.
I know a lot of fishermen won’t want to give away their favorite fishing spots, but I think fishermen are willing to share more than you’d think. Wouldn’t it be nice to have locations you know have been producing for other people? Especially when your time is limited or your normal spots just aren’t getting the job done? Even if you don’t want to share your catch with everyone, you can just use it to log what you caught and where you caught it for future reference.
Lake Conroe Example
Let’s look at an example to see how this works. Take Lake Conroe in Texas. You could use Fishidy to make your way to this spot where this giant white crappie was caught off of the peninsula:
Then you can look in the details of how it was caught and mimic that by fishing the same depth and with the same Texas rigged Brush Hog if you wanted to.
It almost seems like cheating…maybe we shouldn’t be making fishing this easy. But on the other hand, any day on the water where I haul in fish is a success in my book. The whole “building a fishing community” aspect feels kind of good, too. Maybe an online social network isn’t the best way to do it, but it’s a way to build connections with other anglers that you might not have in the first place.
It’s Free!
Did I mention Fishidy is free? Well for a basic membership anyway. But that is all you need to get these awesome features I speak of. If you want access to premium maps to see proven hot spots, bottom structure, and fishing tips from local pros, you’ll need to pony up a few bucks a month. But, you can sign up for a month-by-month subscription for a little more and not be locked into a full year.
So if you want to catch more crappie and bring your fishing game into the modern age of social network-ism, download Fishidy. If not, that’s cool too. Just be glad this type of app hasn’t made its way to hunting yet…
