Our Lakes & Bays Atlas is Now Interactive
LISTEN: (4 min, 9 sec)
ONE OF THE BETTER IDEAS we squeezed out of our heads during the past 41 years in the outdoor publishing business was the annual Texas Lakes & Bays Fishing Atlas.
TL&B was originally designed as a subscription premium back in the late 1980s, when Texas Fish & Game was on a wild and crazy circulation-building spree. We printed the first few editions on dingy newsprint, spewed still ink-wet from the same old printing press in Marble Falls where Fish & Game first came to life.
From the very beginning, production values aside, Lakes & Bays was an ambitious project. With it, we sought to profile every bay system on the Texas Coast and as many freshwater impoundments as we could fit into a 104-page press-run.
Texas Lakes & Bays: 1989 (left) and Current (right)
(Photos: TF&G)
Each of the 45 locations in the first edition included a map—drafted by hand by Nancy Spivey, wife of founding editor Marvin Spivey. Marvin wrote profiles of each water body, including map-keyed descriptions of best fishing spots, ramps and facilities.
TL&B was an instant hit and, as a promotional item, was instrumental in Texas Fish & Game’s meteoric rise from near-zero to 100,000 readers between 1986 and 1991.
We’ve published Lakes & Bays every year since, and with each succeeding edition we added a bit more ambition. In the early Nineties, we put it out on Texas newsstands and it immediately took the crown of Best Selling Outdoor Title, at a time when newsstands still occupied high-profile positions in every retail establishment and periodical publications flourished.
Along the way, we continued to refine and improve. We more than doubled the page count and enlarged the pages, to better display ever-increasingly detailed maps.
In 2003, as marine electronics began to revolutionize fresh and saltwater fishing, we overhauled Lakes & Bays to include hundreds of specific fishing “hotspots,” provided by partnerships with fishing guides who worked each of the profiled water bodies.
A few years ago, we partnered with Navionics, allowing us to enhance the map detail and provide depth contours to each of the published maps.
Texas Lakes & Bays Fishing Atlas remains one of our most popular products, selling briskly at Academy Sports + Outdoors and other retail locations around the state, and through our online store.
ADVERTISEMENT
But the world of physical print publishing is nothing like it was in Texas Lakes & Bays’ infancy. In those days, not even the most avid Star Trek fan could have envisioned high-res screens, not much bigger than a deck of cards, putting more information in our hands instantly than every magazine on every newsstand from Texarkana to El Paso, Port Arthur to Port Isabel, could possibly deliver.
Still, we keep manufacturing TL&B every year, and we still work hard to continue making it better.
This year, we cracked the code—so to speak—for blending our printed Lakes & Bays edition with the world of digital interactivity. In past editions, we devoted dozens of pages to tide and solunar forecasts. As a printed product, this had immediate limitations: space limited the number of locations that could be forecast, and time froze the instant those forecasts were pressed in ink onto the pages.
This edition, out and available as you read this column, has a new interactive feature. QR codes, printed on every map, allow you to get up-to-date tide, solunar and weather conditions for all of the profiled water bodies. For the lakes, the QR code links provide current water levels.
The beauty of this interactive feature is that we can continue to tweak and improve the information—adding new and updated features.
Look for the New Edition of Texas Lakes & Bays at Academy Sports + Outdoors or wherever you can find a newsstand.
Or, you can order it direct from our online store at fishgame.com/fishgamegear.
E-mail Roy at rneves@fishgame.com and Ardia at aneves@fishgame.com
