Free Fishing Log Template: Excel, Google Sheets, and Printable PDF

Search for a fishing log template and here's what you'll actually find: a forum thread from 2012 with a dead attachment link, Etsy listings charging seven bucks for a table somebody made in an afternoon, and Pinterest pins that loop right back to those Etsy listings. That's the whole market. So we built the version that should've existed all along and put it up for free: a 16-column spreadsheet with a Stats tab that does the math for you, a plain CSV, and a printable PDF for anyone who'd rather scribble at the truck. No email gate, no watermark, no "pro version." Download links are right below.

Download the Free Fishing Log Template

Three formats. All free, all yours to keep:

• Excel / Google Sheets template (.xlsx): 16 columns with dropdown menus for water type, time of day, fishing style, water clarity, sky, wind, and moon phase, plus a frozen header row so the labels stay put while you scroll. A second Stats tab auto-calculates trips logged, total fish, fish per trip, skunked trips, skunk rate, and your biggest fish.
• Plain CSV version: just the 16 column headers, ready to import into Numbers, Airtable, a database, or whatever tool you already live in.
• Printable fishing log PDF: three trip-entry blocks per letter-size page. Print a stack, stuff them in your tackle bag, transcribe the interesting ones into the spreadsheet later. Or don't. Paper logs counted as data long before Excel existed.

Google Sheets users: download the .xlsx file, then in Sheets go to File > Import > Upload and pick the file. The dropdowns and Stats formulas use standard spreadsheet features that Sheets supports on import; if a stat looks off afterward, check that the sheet names came through unchanged.

If you stop reading here, that's fine. The template works on its own. The rest of this page covers what to put in it and why, because a fishing log spreadsheet is only as good as the habits behind it.

What should you record in a fishing log?

Record five kinds of things every trip: when and where you fished, what you caught (including zero), what you threw, how you fished it, and the conditions. The conditions are what turn a diary into a pattern-finder. "Caught 4 crappie off the north point" is a memory. "Caught 4 crappie off the north point, 58 degree water, stained, overcast, wind out of the south" is a recipe you can run again next April.

Here's how the 16 columns in the template break down, and what each one is actually for.

The trip basics

Date, Location, Water Type, Time of Day. Boring columns, heavy lifters. Date quietly encodes season, spawn timing, and hatch windows without you doing anything. Location should be more specific than the lake's name: "the riprap by the boat launch" beats "Lake Erie" every time you sort the sheet later. Time of Day matters because a spot that's dead at noon can turn on at dusk, and if you don't write down when you fished, you'll blame the spot instead of the clock.

The catch

Species, Fish Caught, Biggest (in), Style, Fly/Lure. Two habits make these columns worth having. First, count everything, not just keepers. Second, name the actual lure: "black and blue 3/8 oz jig" or "size 16 Parachute Adams," not "jig" or "dry fly." Vague entries feel faster in the moment and cost you the answer six months later when you're staring at the sheet trying to remember which jig. The Style column (casting, trolling, jigging, fly, bait) catches the cases where the lure stayed the same and the presentation was the thing that changed.

The conditions, where the patterns hide

Water Temp, Water Clarity, Air Temp, Sky, Wind, Moon Phase, and Notes. This is the half of the log most anglers skip, and it's the half that pays.

Water temperature is the single most predictive number you can write down. Fish are cold-blooded; temperature drives where they hold and whether they eat. If you fish rivers, you often don't even need a thermometer, because the USGS real-time water data network publishes live temperature and flow readings for thousands of gauged streams. Clarity and wind explain most of the days that temperature doesn't. And moon phase is there so you can test solunar theory on your own water instead of taking a magazine's word for it; grab dates from the U.S. Naval Observatory's moon phase tables if you're backfilling old trips.

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An opinion you won't find on the Etsy templates: if I could only keep three columns beyond date and location, I'd keep Fish Caught, Water Temp, and Wind, and the first thing I'd cut is Fly/Lure. That sounds like heresy. But conditions decide whether fish eat at all, while lure choice mostly decides which of the eating fish you catch. Most anglers log it in exactly the opposite priority.

Notes is for the stuff that doesn't fit a column: bait balls on the graph, a mayfly hatch at 7 pm, the pontoon armada that showed up at 10.

The One Rule: Log the Skunks

If you take nothing else from this page, take this: log every trip, especially the ones where you catch nothing.

Zeros are what make the data honest. A log with only good days is a highlight reel, and a highlight reel can't teach you anything because there's nothing to compare the good days against. The pattern isn't "I catch fish in 58 degree stained water." The pattern is "I catch fish in 58 degree stained water and I get skunked in 48 degree clear water at the same spot." Half of that sentence lives in trips you were tempted not to write down.

This is exactly why the template's Stats tab tracks skunked trips and skunk rate as first-class numbers. A 20% skunk rate at one lake and a 60% rate at another is a decision, sitting right there in a cell.

Skunks sting less when they count as data. That alone is worth the habit.

How to Review Your Log (Twice a Year Is Plenty)

Entering data is the easy half. The log pays you back when you sit down with it, and you don't need to do that often. End of the season and again right before the next one starts, coffee in hand, twenty minutes each.

Sort the sheet a few different ways and ask it questions. Sort by Location and compare skunk rates: is there a lake you keep driving to out of loyalty that the numbers say to drop? Sort by Date and look at what water temps your best months shared. Filter to skunked trips only and look for what they have in common, because skunks cluster around conditions far more often than anglers want to admit. Then scan the Biggest column and check what the weather was doing on those days.

You're not running a regression. You're looking for two or three sentences you can write down and act on next season, like "the creek arm is a waste of time until the water hits the mid 50s." One sentence like that is worth a hundred logged rows, and you can't get it without the rows.

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Is a spreadsheet or an app better for a fishing log?

Honest answer: the spreadsheet is better at being free and being yours, and an app is better at actually getting filled in.

The template above costs nothing, works offline, never gets discontinued, and will still open in twenty years. Nobody can put your data behind a subscription. That's a real advantage, and it's why this page exists.

The spreadsheet's weakness is the conditions half of the log, the half that matters most. Sky, wind, air temp, moon phase: you either record them streamside or you're reconstructing them from memory three days later, and that's the point where most paper and spreadsheet logs quietly die. It starts feeling like homework.

That's the actual reason we built Bushwhack. Log a catch with a date and location and it fills in the weather, air temp, moon phase, and season automatically, so an entry takes about 30 seconds standing in the water, and the charts version of that seasonal review builds itself as you go. This template deliberately mirrors the fields the app tracks, so nothing gets lost in translation if you ever move your data over. You can poke around the live demo dashboard, loaded with three years of sample logs, to see what the spreadsheet's Stats tab grows up into.

But start with whichever one you'll actually use on Saturday. A half-filled spreadsheet beats an empty app, and the reverse is just as true.

How many trips before patterns show up?

Plan on a season or two. As a floor, figure 20 to 30 logged trips before the trends are stronger than the noise.

Small samples lie. Five trips is a hot streak or a cold snap, not a pattern; you can convince yourself of nearly anything with five rows of data, and anglers routinely do. By 20 or 30 trips the flukes start canceling out, and the boring, repeatable stuff (this water temp, that wind, this spot in that month) rises to the top. The anglers who swear by their logs are almost always the ones a few seasons deep.

So don't quit at trip 12 because the sheet hasn't handed you a revelation yet. It's compounding. And since patterns are seasonal, the real payoff arrives the first time a season comes back around and you get to fish against last year's notes.

The template's free either way. The data only shows up if you put it there.