Hello all,

I am getting ready to start working on a map for a 12000 acre lake. I recently did a 4100 acre lake and it took almost 4 hours and I had issues. Thanks to the fine support of Matt I was able to salvage it.


There has to be quicker, easier way to do this. Any tips or advise would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thank you,
Joel

Plenty of coffee and make no plans for the evenings for the next 3 weeks. Some lakes take months to get right, so your 4 hours isn't particularly bad. The more time you put into getting it right the better it will be.
Save your work as you go along........
Personally I'd use another source of imagery and a proper GIS program to construct the shoreline, but thats entirely up to you.

T

Understood.. Thanks for the reply and advice.

if you wanted a fairly low resolution　and rough coastline, you could try the free World Vector Shoreline at www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/shorelines.html. They sometimes include lakes (especially the bigger ones), but its primarily for coastline.

Haven't really come across other more detailed coastlines so ended up doing quite a bit of clicking myself!

I will definitely check that out. Thank you hermes.

Do any of you use graphic tablets for this? If so what should I look for? Seems like this might be the 'easier' way than a traditional mouse and PC.

AnglingCharts wrote:
What would you recommend then?
With some lakes I'm having diffelculties with the shorelines because the google earth images are not updated recently and the shoreline has changed in the meantime. So I can't get a correct shoreline.

It might just have been our luck, but in Norway the national waterauthority has a lot of shorelines already drawn up. Dan and I got about shorelines for 600 or so lakes from them. Most of them are pretty rough, but they can be improved in Google Earth or directly in Reefmaster.

So it might be worth your time to send out a few emails to literally test the water. :)

Also take a look at the National Hydrography Dataset. This holds shorelines for just about every water body (of any size) in the US, in a format that can used directly in RM. There is a detailed description of how to use this data in this post.

Having said that, the site doesn't seem to be working properly at the moment. Hopefully just a temporary glitch!

And what option(s) does a guy who lives in The Netherlands has? ;-)

Walleye_Fisherman wrote:
GlobalMapper has some really nice features to draw shorelines almost automatically, but unfortunately, it is not free software.

Walk the shoreline and logging? :)