New videos make it easy to find fish on Arkansas lakes

Aug. 20, 2019

Randy Zellers

Assistant Chief of Communications

LITTLE ROCK — The summer heat can push most fish deep, especially during the middle of the day. Finding these fish is all about finding the cover they’re holding on. Thanks to the work of the AGFC, thousands of deep-water hot spots are available for anglers. Here’s how to find them.

Roughly 3,500 fish attractor locations have been formed by the AGFC in the last five years. Each of these locations includes at least a half-dozen trees, bamboo piles or artificial structures to concentrate fish in some of Arkansas’s aging reservoirs. 

Thousands of fish attractors are loaded into the AGFC’s databases, but anglers sometimes have a hard time adding their locations to their chart plotters and GPS units. With some lakes having hundreds of attractors to try, hand-entering latitude and longitude for each pile can take hours. To help anglers “load up and go,” the AGFC’s Geographic Information Systems Division built special downloadable files already in the format needed for the most popular brands of fishfinders and GPS units. One download will plot every attractor in a given lake.

“Just go to www.agfc.com/fishattractors and you’ll see the list of all the downloadable files,” said Paige Lott, GIS analyst for the AGFC. “We also have developed a series of helpful videos to walk you through loading the files on today’s most popular fishfinder/GPS units. Each brand has their own way of mapping the points, so I’d strongly suggest watching the videos before trying to load the files.”

Visit the AGFC’s interactive map as well as the downloadable fish attractor portal at www.agfc.com/en/resources/maps.