Waypoint management
by Whitewater 22 Dec 2023 21:54 UTC
Jay Przekurat, shares his system for keeping your hotspots organized to be more productive on the water, and advance cleaner, faster-running graphs © Whitewater
Despite his age, Whitewater Fishing pro, Jay Przekurat, has proved himself amidst some of the best bass anglers in the world, competing in the Bassmaster Opens Series.
In 2022, he became the youngest Bassmaster Elite Series winner. He's also caught one of the biggest B.A.S.S. bags on record with a four-day total of 102 lbs., 9 oz in smallmouth bass: making him the youngest to join the Century Club. He also had first-place in the 2020 Bassmaster Eastern Open and a first-place finish in the 2019 Bassmaster Central Open.
One of the keys to his success? Effectively managing waypoints for quick and efficient fishing, whether he's competing in a top-level tournament or simply fishing the Wisconsin waters around his Stevens Point home.
"Fishing B.A.S.S. events has taught me a lot of things," says Przekurat. "Since I'm just a few years into the tour, I've been introduced to waters I've never fished, many of them new season-to-season. We're talking about a dozen new lakes each year."
What many of the competitors have over the young Przekurat is years of experience on these tournament bass waters. That means the young competitor must be super-efficient in his pre-fishing and put together solid plans for game days.
A microSD card for each lake fished
"Basically, what I've come up with is running a separate microSD card for each lake. I carry s small card holder and file each lake during the season on a separate microSD card into the individual slots in the card holder," offers Przekurat.
Przekurat continues: "For example, last year Lake Okeechobee was the first tournament of the year. When I was done fishing Okeechobee, I inserted a blank microSD card into my unit, and exported everything I did on Lake Okeechobee that week to the microSD card, then deleted the info off my Garmin unit, and later backed up the info to my computer,"
He says one benefit of clearing his Garmin units of waypoints, tracks, and routes, is the graphs run a lot faster, beside appearing "cleaner when you don't have a lot of data storage on them."
Przekurat encourages anglers to back up all microSD cards to laptop in the event of a microSD card failure. "It can be a little risky when you're storing everything on microSD cards, but if you back them up, you'll be fine."
He says the entire system really streamlines his fishing.
"When we go back to a lake I've fished, I simply pop in the microSD card and all of my former waypoints, tracks, and routes are right there. And the only information that shows up on my graph is for that specific body of water—no extra data decreasing processing speed or cluttering up my screen."
And it's not just tournament lakes that Przekurat adopts this system.
"For fishing around home, I generally keep two separate microSD cards — "smaller lakes" and another one for tournament fisheries nearby."
If there's any downside, it's that you'll end up having to buy quite a few microSD cards, but Przekurat says it's "well worth it" and adds that "keeping everything super neat and organized just makes my Garmin graphs run so much better without all that storage on them—they're definitely a lot quicker."
Looking for a way to fish faster, organize your waypoints, and optimize your graph performance? Might just want to give B.A.S.S. Elite Champion, Jay Przekurat's system a try!