"Pretty cool," Demalderis told me. "It's like having a navigational chart, like you'd use in a lake or
saltwater, with the wrecks and reefs marked. Only it works from your car. You're in a place, you want to make a move somewhere else, you just pull it up and find what's nearby, and it tells you the shortest route, so you don't burn up $3-a-gallon gas."
The guide says he's used it to find "small brook-trout streams I could never locate before." He's started recommending it to clients for "the guy who's in town, maybe on business, he's got four hours and a GPS, now he can go fishing in places he'd never know were right there."
This is a wireless-age version of the fishing maps that Ultimate Fishing founder Mike Gogal, a Temple grad and professional video producer, used to publish through the former Alfred B. Patton Co. in the 1990s.
Gogal told me he sold more than 50,000 maps a year, at $5 to $7 each, before his wife's death in 1996. She had handled all customer orders, and he didn't feel like going on without her.
Remarried and resettled in Warrington, Gogal began working on next-generation fishing maps two years ago with neighbor Mark Burdack, a software developer. The new map lives on a thumbnail-size GPS chip inserted into Garmin units. Gogal has also issued a new generation of paper-based Pennsylvania fishing maps (three editions covering different parts of the state, at $15 each) through King of Prussia's Franklin Maps.
On a demonstration, Gogal piloted me toward spots to hunt bass along the Schuylkill, trout in the Wissahickon and Chester Creeks, channel catfish off Flat Rock Dam and the Frankford Arsenal. It's surprising, he said, how fish have recovered in the city and its suburbs.
