Over the past year, the AAF and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) have been in talks to roll out a brand new personal logbook platform for all of you anglers out there. After months of fine-tuning, we are proud to announce that this new and improved personal logbook will soon hit the app store!
As many long time AAF supporters may know, for years we've hosted the IAngler personal logbook. At the time, this platform was a really solid option for anglers looking to save their fishing trips, take pictures of their catches, and categorize them for ease of access later on. Our hope was to provide a place for anglers to not just revisit their most treasured fishing excursions, but improve their catch rates over time. If you visit the same fishing spot enough times and record the different conditions and fishing techniques used for each trip, with enough trips logged you will start to see a pattern. Whether you start to see that the bite improves right before a storm rolls in, or that your target species tends to be more active right after a full moon, or any number of other variables, you can take that knowledge to plan your trips accordingly. You can even use your own data to gauge when the conditions aren't optimal for your usual spots, and use those opportunities to explore new ones!
Over time, our IAngler logbook stayed a consistent option for anglers who wanted to log their trips. As the years
rolled by, however, more angler logbook platforms flooded the market, making it increasingly difficult for people to find it even with a google search. It became the AAF's best kept secret, even though we didn't want it to become one.
This is where or partnership with TNC began. Seasoned in their own right when it comes to the personal logbook field, TNC has hosted the MyFishCount app for nearly a decade. They garnered a group of dedicated users, and did a really great job of keeping their members engaged over that period of time. At their core, though, they wanted to find a way to use their platform to help them with their other conservation pursuits. Our collaboration would prove to be a veritable mosaic of the best aspects of both organizations, with each providing feedback to create one app that can replace both the old IAngler app and MyFishCount app, while keeping the best parts of each around for the new platform. The AAF brought experience and functionality to the table. TNC followed suit with their guidance on what data would be most useful for enhancing regulation for a carefully selected group of rare encounter deep sea species, and their proven widespread appeal in the wider conservation landscape as a whole. 
Through this, the new and improved IAngler app was born.
The new IAngler logbook will launch with a number improvements over its previous two counterparts. The interface of the app has been streamlined for ease of use, while still allowing anglers to save as much information as they want for each and every trip they log. You can create a trip from scratch, under a minute flat, so that you can get your eyes off of the phone and back on your rod tip. After creating a trip, you can then add all of your catches in similarly speedy fashion; some may want to log their catches as specifically as possible, meticulously adding photos, comments, and accurate lengths to each fish individually. At other times, when you're in a bit of a rush, you can log all your catches from the same species all at once, with minimal input necessary other than the species and number of fish you caught.
Additionally, IAngler will allow you to create a library of your favorite spots, so that you never forget exactly where you were when you caught that PB Snook, or were surrounded by the biggest school of redfish you ever saw. You can go back through previous trips, and sort through them using different parameters such as date, number of fish caught, location, or any other parameter that you choose. Finally, the weather tab will ensure that you never have to leave the app when planning your next fishing trip.
With the rollout of the new platform, there are a couple of dates that you should be aware of. For any of you still using the original IAngler app, April 8th will be the last day that you’re able to log catches. A week later, on April 15th, all of your trips and catch logs from the old IAngler will get transferred over to the new one. Finally, if everything goes as planned, April 22nd should be the date where you can download the new IAngler app off of the App Store, or visit IAngler.org to create an account in the desktop version.
With all the improvements made, we know it’ll be one of the very best logbooks on the market, so download it on April 22nd to see for yourself!