Graeme Christie | Tuesday, 21 July 2026
Paul mentioned in his column this week that most of his six kilo plus snakehead have come in late July and August. Think about that sentence for a second. He can only say it because he knows. Years of fish, dates attached. That sentence is a fishing log doing its job.
I've just found out what my memory is worth. This month I built a proper log, a spreadsheet, one row per day fished, and backfilled the trips I could reconstruct.
The interesting part came when I put flows and tides next to the catches, because patterns showed up that I had never noticed while actually fishing.
The best one is from a spot on water that answers to a power station. A lot of our rivers do. Generation follows electricity demand, and in winter the demand swings are big, so the water swings are big too. I knew that in a vague sort of way. The log had the numbers.
In May I caught two good fish there and thought nothing of the time of day. The log put the catch next to the flow data and the tide tables and quietly suggested it was no accident. There's a pattern in there. One data point, so it proves nothing yet, and I'm not going to spell it out, partly because it's untested and partly because it would apply to hydro rivers all over the country and some things you should have to find in your own notebook. But I have a theory now, and a next trip to test it on. Memory would never have handed me that. Memory was still about the work, which I suspect still applies as well.
So the log doesn't need to be poetry. Date, water, flow, tide if it matters, what you fished, what happened. One honest line at the end.
My WhatsApp has been an accidental log for a while, flows and flies and who I fished with, and the archive has already saved when I needed information. But the spreadsheet is the real thing, blanks and all.
Getting March 2024 lake levels meant a data request to the regional council. So somewhere in an office in Christchurch, someone pulled two-year-old hourly lake data so that I could learn my story of one fishing trip.