Breaking Down an Upland Reservoir

When things seem big and overwhelming, it’s time to break them down into smaller, more manageable parts.

That’s the topic for today…picking a key characteristic or feature of a body of water you are planning on fishing and then using that characteristic or feature to categorize the lake.

You could do this using geographic sections, North, South, East, and West for example. Or maybe, upriver, downriver, midriver. You could name sections of a reservoir by the prominent tributaries that feed it.

I’m going to use a reservoir in central Washington State as my example for this demonstration. Potholes Reservoir is easily one of, if not the most unique bodies of water that I’ve ever been too.

If you can break this reservoir down, you can break almost any other down.

In the video below, I show you how to use Google Earth to create a path that marks a channel at Potholes Reservoir.

Once I’ve got paths, or trails or tracks…or whatever you want to call them, I can approach the reservoir one channel at a time, treating each channel like its own section.