It’s limited to Minnesota lakes, for now, but a new fishing platform from onX, the Missoula, Mont.-based digital mapping company, is on track to becoming a one-stop shop for pretty much any kind of information an angler could want.
OnX Fish, as it’s called, has been free to anglers since it went live in April. The new fishing platform is modeled after onX Hunt, an industry leader in the digital mapping industry. Developers are still in the “feedback-gathering stage,” said Joel Nelson, senior regional vertical marketing manager for onX. A fishing pro and outdoors enthusiast from Cannon Falls, Minn. Nelson has a 25-year background in GIS (Geographic Information System) technology and joined onX in April.
Nelson and Jack Flatley, public relations manager for onX in Missoula, hosted a virtual demonstration of the Minnesota onX Fishing platform on Oct. 30. Like onX Hunt, the fishing platform offers everything from satellite imagery and GPS waypoint collection to location-specific weather forecasts.
The weather feature on the onX Fish app provides conditions and forecasts for specific locations, not just a general area. The app also features links for readers to share feedback. (Courtesy of onX Maps)
Users can also download maps to navigate offline in areas without cell service.
“The user interface of the actual app is very similar and seamless to the hunt app,” Flatley said. “A lot of the design is based off our onX Hunt style, so it’s pretty seamless, the usability between onX Hunt and onX Fish. It’s just tailored to different pursuits.”
“Thousands” of Minnesotans use the onX Hunt app, Flatley says.
Back in the day, Nelson says, he used to contact the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and request fisheries survey reports for specific lakes. The information was limited, he says, “unless you knew exactly where you were going to be fishing.”
The DNR later launched its online LakeFinder tool, which offers data on more than 4,500 Minnesota lakes. Nelson, who worked with the “In Depth Outdoors” TV fishing show for several years as a side gig, said he used LakeFinder to find filming locations – especially off-the-beaten-path bluegill lakes.
“We wouldn’t highlight the lake name, but we would help people find new water,” Nelson said. Joining onX, he says, provided the opportunity to blend his GIS career with his background as a professional angler.
“This was the marrying of that fish survey data work and all the side industry stuff I’ve been doing with the mapping side of things,” Nelson said. “To me as an angler, I think the biggest advantage that onX Fish gives you is that ability to find new water, and sometimes water that’s right next door that you’ve discounted, looked past, driven past 100 times but never really been curious enough to find a reason to go fish it.
“Hopefully, onX Fish helps us not just find that water, but inspires us to fish it, too.”
Filter function is key
Where onX Fish “really starts to turn the corner for a lot of anglers,” Nelson says, is the ability to filter specific lake and species information. An angler fishing Lake Mille Lacs, for example, might not be able to get on the water on a particular day because of high winds. By setting the filter to select for nearby lakes and further drill down to specific species – smallmouth bass, for example – a series of smaller windows will pop up showing all of the smallmouth lakes in the area.
“As you mouse over them, you see they highlight on the map, and you can click on specific lakes to get an idea” of what’s there, Nelson said.
That includes everything from depth contours, results from DNR netting surveys, lake-specific regulations, trophy fish potential, keeper fish potential, public and private land ownership, the location of public accesses (if any) and amenities such as bathrooms and parking.
“All of this is based on DNR data,” Nelson said. “This isn’t crowdsourcing. This isn’t data from my 12-year-old son, who is trying to hide the fact that he caught bass in a different lake. This is real data from the DNR that’s historically accurate and gives us a real snapshot into what’s going on from a species perspective.”
Let’s say an angler is looking to find lakes with potential for keeper-size crappies in a specific area. “Lake X” is identified as a decent crappie lake, but there’s no public boat access. Like onX Hunt, the onX Fish app also shows public and private land ownership designations and – sure enough – there’s accessible public land along the shoreline.
“We can see that in July (2022), it was surveyed, and there were quite a few (crappies) in that 9- to 11-inch range, and that actually makes up the bulk of the fish in that lake, and it’s listed as a lake with a high catch per unit of effort,” Nelson said. “It’s above average for lakes of its class and a lot of (the crappies) are in the keeper range.”
The lake could be an ice fishing gem.
“It really – as we like to say – gave us 10 years of information in 10 minutes for you to know that,” Nelson said.
The onX Fish app also allows users to “go back in time” and view satellite imagery showing what conditions were like on a particular lake during a specific two-week range of dates. A look at the eastern shore of Upper Red Lake between Dec. 25, 2023, and Jan. 8, 2024, for example, shows the location of cracks and open water that developed because of unseasonably warm weather and a late freeze-up.
“You can actually look at all kinds of features on the ice,” Nelson said. “You can look at ice-ups, ice-outs. On Upper Red Lake, you can see all of the roads that are plowed and the fish houses. And this imagery is updated every week and a half to two weeks, so you can actually track the development of the ice road system from last winter on a two-week basis.”
According to Flatley, onX chose Minnesota to begin development of onX Fish because there’s a “large, extremely devout and well intentioned” fishing community. In addition, the Minnesota DNR has a “very robust” data set with the fisheries information anglers are seeking.
The onX Fish app gathers information from a variety of other sources, as well. Instead of having to go several different places for information on lake surveys, contour maps, satellite imagery and weather forecasts – to name just a few – onX Fish offers all of that data in one place.
“It’s just unbelievable the information that’s out there, and our goal is not to ‘hotspot’ anything,” Nelson said. “Our goal is to distribute the load, and we’re not pressuring too many individual fisheries at once, but rather trying to spread out (pressure).”
Favorable response
So far, response to the Minnesota onX Fish app has been favorable, Flatley says, but there’s more work to do before the company charges users for the information. Eventually, onX Fish will be a subscription-based service like onX Hunt.
“We’re in a feedback-gathering loop, more or less, with the Minnesota fishing community, seeing what they like about the app, seeing what they don’t like about the app, what are the biggest use cases that they’re trying to solve that we can kind of step in and be a tool for them to solve those problems,” Flatley said. “We’re listening to the Minnesota fishing community, and (they’re) guiding us in the direction that a lot of these features are going.”
For now, the app is only available on the iOS platform, but plans are in the works to expand the app to users of Android phones, as well. In the meantime, Android users can access the onX Fish app and most of the features it offers on their smartphone’s web browser.
Providing, of course, that cell service is available.
“You don’t have the option for offline maps and things like that that you see in the app, but it is a good stopgap until that’s further developed,” Nelson said.
Looking ahead, the onX Fish app will soon be available for Wisconsin, and while there’s no timetable, plans are also in the works to eventually offer app-specific fishing information for the Dakotas and other states in the Midwest.
“What we’re seeing already is expert and upper-level intermediate anglers glomming onto this thing, grabbing it with both hands,” Nelson said. “As we continue to educate folks about how really easy it is to use – this doesn’t require a Ph.D. to log into and really get a lot of information quick – we’re going to find other anglers learning this process and learning how to fish the onX way, making it that much more enjoyable when they go out.”
Find more information about the app at onxmaps.com/fish/app.
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