Your best bait needs a denominator.

Start with a fair question

Which bait caught the most fish in your notes? That is easy to answer. Which bait deserves the next hour of fishing? That takes more care. A bait used all afternoon has had more opportunity than one tried for fifteen minutes.

Our notebook method starts with one bait session: one bait, its time in use, a count, and the conditions you actually observed. It is a practical recordkeeping suggestion, not a controlled study or a promise about your next trip.

Keep the blank sessions

In a fictional example, four fish in two hours is two fish per hour. Add a second two-hour session with no fish and the combined rate becomes one fish per hour. Deleting the blank session would leave the prettier number and lose half the story.

The chart adds fish and hours before dividing. It does not average the rates of unequal sessions. Notes without hours stay in the catch totals but are excluded from the rate chart. Unknown effort is not treated as zero.

Do not give the bait all the credit

If the bait, depth, hook, location and time all changed, your notebook cannot isolate which change mattered. Treat the chart as a prompt for your next comparison. Keep the setup similar where practical, describe what changed, and record another session.

NIST's experimental-design handbook is a useful starting point for the distinction between a planned comparison and casual observation. These fishing charts are descriptive summaries of your own notes, not an experiment or evidence of causation.

NIST: Introduction to experimental design ↗

Make each hour count once

If one session produced multiple species, do not repeat its full duration on a separate note for every species. That would inflate effort. Use a single mixed-session note with Other as the species, or divide genuinely separate periods and explain the choice.

Write down the result before it becomes the version of the story you tell at supper. Keep the original photograph separately and export your device log after a useful trip. A graph is only as dependable as the notes underneath it.