Walleye tournament brings high-tech maps
By Brad Dokken, Associated Press

DEVILS LAKE, N.D. — When Bruce "Doc" Samson hits the water for the Wal-Mart RCL walleye tournament that begins here Wednesday, he'll be at the helm of a boat with a control panel that resembles the Starship Enterprise.

An impressive array of electronics — everything from a laptop computer and wireless monitor, to color sonar and global positioning system technology — covers the dashboard of Samson's 20-foot Crestliner walleye fishing machine. As technological trappings go, not even Mr. Spock or Capt. James T. Kirk could claim bragging rights over Samson, a retired physician from Minnetrista, Minn., who left the medical field to concentrate on competitive walleye fishing.

The same could be said for the 150-plus walleye pros competing against Samson this week on Devils Lake. While GPS technology, which relies on satellites to pinpoint specific locations, is a common tool in competitive walleye fishing, few walleye pros have blended the technology with aerial photos, satellite elevation charts and custom-designed contour maps, Samson says.

"I've shown it to quite a few pros," Samson said. "Not everyone is computer literate, and not everyone is willing to put the work" into learning the technology.

Samson says his customized maps are a perfect fit with his "Three Fs" approach to fishing: "Find the fish. Fish the fish. And find your way back."

"I can see myself on the lake," said Samson, a Cavalier native and University of North Dakota alumnus. "I can see the shallow water and know where all the bays are before I get there. The guys who fish (Devils Lake) all the time know that. I have to make my time as productive as I can on a new lake."

That's important when this kind of money is at stake. Named for the makers of Ranger, Crestliner and Lund boats, the RCL tournament on Devils Lake features more than $400,000 in cash and prizes.

Samson's foray into this latest high-tech offering resulted from a posting he saw on the walleyecentral.com Web site. Warren Parsons, who runs a small mapping company in Forest Lake, Minn., was advertising his ability to customize maps using anything from aerial photos and contour maps, to specific routes anglers plot with their GPS and sonar units.

For Samson, the service seemed like a perfect fit with tournament fishing — especially on Devils Lake, where a series of wet years has boosted water levels by nearly 25 feet, inundating farms, shelterbelts and stock ponds and tripling the lake's surface area to about 122,000 acres.

To launch this merging of old and new, Parsons purchased a series of government aerial photos and topographical maps, which showed the Devils Lake area before the lake's rise. He then married the photos and contour elevations, storing the information on a computer chip that Samson was able to load into his sonar and read with the on-board mapping software in his laptop computer.

The result, Parsons says, was like peeling away the water, mapping all of the structure and reflooding the lake.

"He looked at the first image and said 'Yes, I want that,'" said Parsons, who attended UND for three years studying geography, computer science and meteorology. "Bruce is ahead the curve, so it was easy to show him."

Parsons left his job as a surveyor for the Minnesota Department of Transportation in 1998 to concentrate full-time on mapping lakes.

It's a time consuming process, he says, that involves dividing a lake into grids and recording the depth at intervals of 50 meters or less. He says his custom maps, meanwhile, can be adapted for a variety of outdoors uses such as deer hunting and navigating lakes or rivers. The maps come in a variety of formats, including laminated paper or tiny computer chips.

Joined by Parsons, Samson had his first chance to put the customized Devils Lake maps to use Thursday while fishing a part of the lake that didn't exist just a few years ago. By following a blinking icon on the laptop screen, which represented his real-time location in relation to an old aerial photo, Samson found inundated roadbeds, stock ponds and shelterbelts. The sonar readings from his Lowrance LCX-104C, a $2,300 unit that combines navigation and sonar capabilities, confirmed the changes in depth and the identity of the structure below the water.

Coming up to an old road on the aerial photo, Samson watched the depth on his sonar rise from 14 feet in the ditches to 8 feet on the top of the road. The road showed up as a pronounced hump on the sonar. On several occasions, he easily found small piles of field rock at the corners of farm fields that now are submerged.

"A lot of these old roads are gravel, and you know what likes gravel — walleyes," Samson said. Ditto for the rock piles.

As fisheries managers across the country struggle to cope with the impact of technology on fish populations, Samson says he doesn't see this latest mapping capability as a threat. It's just a tool, he says, to make his time on the water more efficient.

"There is nothing that has hurt fish more than the sonar," he said. "What I'm doing is not going to hurt the fish at all. It's still my sonar that allows me to see the fish and understand the structure."

Custom mapping technology might give Samson an edge going into Wednesday's tournament, but he already has a history of success on Devils Lake, winning two In-Fisherman Professional Walleye Trail events in 1999 and 2002. He also landed a $300,000 check for winning the Wal-Mart RCL Walleye Championship in October 2002 on the Mississippi River in Red Wing, Minn.

It inspired Samson to trade his medical career for a full-time job fishing. He supplements his tournament fishing with promotional work for manufacturers such as Lowrance, giving seminars on sonar, GPS and other fish-catching tools. The rest of the time, Samson says he's thinking about fishing and studying up on waters for the upcoming tournament season.

"I do a lot of homework in the winter — anything to save me time when I'm on the water," Samson said. "I've been looking at these (Devils Lake) maps on computer for over a year."

Just learning to use the technology, he says, is a big job.

"But there's nothing wrong with hard work," he said. "It's just like a donkey with a carrot in front of him."

And if that carrot turns into a tournament win on Devils Lake, that would be just fine by this Doc.

Contributing: reprinted by permission of the Grand Forks Herald