What is Gone Fishin’ GA?
Gone Fishin’ GA is a free bass tournament simulation you play in the browser, built in the spirit of BassTour — Dick Olsen’s shareware DOS game from 1991 that a lot of us grew up on. If you remember it, you remember the shape of it: the whole lake laid out from above in the middle of the screen, the instruments arranged around it, a clock that would not stop, and the sinking feeling of being on the far end of the lake with a livewell full of fish and not enough time to get back to the dock. That is the game we tried to build again, for a South Georgia lake, without asking anyone to download a thing.
The tournament runs three days. Each day is six hours of game time, seven in the morning until one in the afternoon. You launch at the marina with a full tank and a full battery, pick a rod, a lure and a color, and go find fish. Your five biggest bass count each day, and when you catch a sixth the smallest one goes back — culling, the same as a real tournament. When the clock runs out, you had better be inside the marina circle with the weigh-in button pressed, because fish that never make it to the scale never happened. Best three-day total against four other anglers takes it.
The boat
Three ways to move, the same as the original. The trolling motor is quiet and runs on the battery, so that is how you fish a bank. The outboard is fast and burns fuel, and it spooks every fish you run over. The paddle is slow and free, which matters the first time you run the tank dry a mile from the marina. There is an anchor, a livewell aerator (fish kept without it cost you a dead-fish penalty at the scale), and an LCD fish finder that shows the depth under the boat and how many fish are in range — both the finder and the aerator draw on the battery, so watch the gauge.
Matching the lure to the water
This is the whole game, and it is where the sim earns its name. Lake Wiregrass has grass beds, a stump field, laydowns, a brush pile, a riprap bank, main-lake and secondary points, boat docks, and an old creek channel that holds the deepest water. Each lure family works a depth band and certain kinds of cover: a topwater popper over grass at first light, a spinnerbait through wood on a windy overcast day, a crankbait on a point, a worm almost anywhere, a jig for the big one holding tight to a brush pile. Water clarity changes day to day and favors natural colors when it is clear and dark or bright colors when it is stained. The panel tells you honestly whether your current lure is a good, fair or poor match for the spot the boat is sitting on.
What we kept from the original, and what we didn’t
We kept the bird’s-eye lake, the tournament clock and the weigh-in deadline, the fuel and battery, the three motors, the finder, the aerator, the lure-matching, the standings, and the novice and pro difficulty levels. We did not try to reproduce BassTour’s sixteen lakes or its 2,300 lure and color combinations — one lake and fifteen honest choices felt right for a game you play on your phone in a parking lot. Your best three-day total is saved on your own device only.
If it puts you in the mood for the real thing: our South Georgia fishing spots guide covers where to go, the Hunt & Fish Forecast scores the days ahead, RiverWatch has live river levels, and Georgia’s real statewide daily limits — 10 bass, 30 crappie, 50 bream — are on the DNR regulations page.
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