The FishMapper^TM Story

Capt. Mark Ounanian

Coastal Software Corporation

So where did FishMapper come from, anyway?

It was actually somewhat of an accident, something I originally thought about just for me and maybe a few close friends. Although I never intended it to really be a product for sale, it’s now being bought and used by saltwater fishermen from south Texas around the Gulf coast to the Florida Keys and up Florida’s Atlantic coast including the coast of Georgia. And soon, region coverage will extend all the way up the Atlantic coast to northern Maine. So how did this all come about? Part of the answer is that FishMapper was conceived by a saltwater fisherman for saltwater fishermen, to be a powerful tool to add to our arsenal of high-tech fishing gear. It wasn’t designed by some corporate marketing type that never set foot on a boat or caught a fish in his life. Here’s a little background.

I was transplanted here to the Gulf coast of Alabama about 40 years ago, and I grew up fishing streams, ponds, rivers, lakes and then bays, and finally the Gulf of Mexico. After doing my time as a deckhand on a charter boat in the summers during college, I earned my Captain’s License from the USCG to run fishing charters. In that time, I managed to catch or assist in catching just about every local species of fresh and saltwater fish that you can catch using hook and line, including two species they say you can’t.

For the past 20 years, I have been publishing fishing maps and charts along the northern Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida under the name Coastal Mapping Company. These quality maps and charts are still providing offshore fishermen with great information on where to locate the different species in the area, as well as providing a huge source of Loran coordinates (TD’s) and Lat/Lon coordinates (GPS) for bottom fishing spots in the Gulf of Mexico. But for years the problem of what size paper we could print on, and how much area could be on that chart for the scale and not have the reef data too cluttered, has always been a factor when designing a good chart. With a printed chart, there’s just no way to zoom in or out. And accurately measuring distances can be tedious and difficult.

During those 20 years of mapmaking, fishermen have been calling me and asking a lot of questions, and one of the most often-asked questions was, “Do you sell a chart without all those artificial reefs already on it, so I can enter my own fishing spots on it to see where they are in relation to each other?” Until recently, the only thing I could tell them was to do what I had been doing for years… using graph paper, and marking my hot spots one by one so I could see where they were.

In May of 2001 I asked my brother-in-law, who is an engineer for an aerospace research lab as well as a coastal fisherman in the Chesapeake Bay, if he could make me a graph paper plotter for my computer so I could type in my Lat/Lon coordinates and let it plot them on the screen for me and then print them out instead of using actual graph paper. Next thing I know Mike is saying he’s going to put a coastline in it, and now it’ll let you check bearing and distance from one spot to another, and soon it’ll let you build trips and tell you how long the trip is, and so on. Then we put our huge database of artificial reefs, natural reefs and oilrigs into the program, and pretty soon it was starting to look like something other offshore fishermen would have to have.

So I realized I needed to see if anything like this was already on the market, and I found out that chart programs were becoming available for home computers. But after looking into just what was really available and talking with knowledgeable friends in the marine electronics business, I discovered that the main application for these expensive programs was cruising navigation, not fishing. Most of these programs were basically scanned NOAA charts, with some ways of planning a lengthy trip to a port you were unfamiliar with. They were useless to fishermen.

When the prototype of our program, which Mike was now calling FishMapper, was completed I showed it to some fishing friends. Some told me that it is what they have been looking for, and others told me that it does more than some programs they had bought for a lot more money than we were planning to charge. And they told me that those other programs said they did what FishMapper does, but they found out that just wasn’t true. And besides, FishMapper was a whole lot easier to use. It looked like we had a winner.

I thought when we started selling the first version of FishMapper to fishermen in April of 2002, that the program already did enough. Wrong! The more we use it, and the more we hear from other fishermen using it, the more ideas we get for new features that actually help fishermen plan their trips better so they can catch more fish. The new FishMapper v2.0 3D Edition now includes high-resolution color map backgrounds that show amazing bottom detail in some areas, and also includes other new features such as NOAA data buoy and water level reporting station locations with online data retrieval over the Internet. The list of ideas keeps growing.

So take a look at what we’ve done. FishMapper is the last fishing chart you will ever need. It’s never obsolete, and it’s not confined to the limited space of a single paper chart. You can zoom in and out, pan any direction to see other areas, and if you want to unclutter the chart window so you can see only your own hotspots, just click the public reefs and oil/gas rigs off with the click of a button on the toolbar. FishMapper does everything a fisherman needs (and more). I think you’ll enjoy using it.

Now go fish.

Last updated September 1, 2003. Send comments to webmaster@coastalsoftwarecorp.com

Fish Paintings Courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Diane Peebles (Artist)

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The FishMapperTM Story

The FishMapper^TM Story