What boat lanes are.
On a big reservoir full of standing timber, stumps and old roadbeds, "boat lanes" are the routes boats use to cross it: the running lanes they take at speed and the idling lanes they take slowly. Some lakes have buoyed lanes from the lake authority; many anglers load lanes as a file on their fish finder.
Five things that get called lanes
Running lanes
Routes across the open lake that boats run at speed, between the main areas, the ramps and the creek arms. In Bass Lanes they're computed from where boats have been seen running in years of satellite and aerial imagery, kept in water deep enough on our depth model.
Idling lanes
Slow routes: out of a boat ramp to the running lanes, under a bridge, or through old standing timber. They always look different from running lanes, in another colour or dashed, so an idling stretch is never mistaken for a running one.
Waypoints
Single points saved on a fish finder: a ramp, a brush pile, an old bridge. A route made only of waypoints isn't a lane.
Fishing hotspots
Places where boats keep stopping to fish, found from boats seen sitting still on many different days. They're where people fish, not a promise of fish.
Depth contours
Lines of equal depth from a lake survey. They show the shape of the bottom, not where boats run.
"Guide lanes" usually means lanes recorded by a local guide. Bass Lanes doesn't sell guide-run lanes: ours are computed from public data, and say so on every lane until a local guide has checked them on the water.
How Bass Lanes makes them
We find boats in every free satellite and aerial photo of the lake we can get, from the years since the dam closed: running boats and their wakes, and boats sitting to fish. Where boats keep running is where the running lanes go, checked against a depth model from the lake's official survey and kept clear of the timber standing in the photos. Each lane records the lake level it needs. The full method and sources.
Lakes with Bass Lanes
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