Skipper Jack’s Tales of Yellowfin and the Albatross

Hello again shipmates. It’s an inclement day outside as I gaze out the window overlooking the harbour in Fowey. I’m in The Salty Dog, of course, with Gerald. We drinks cider as a rule and today is no exception. We’ll just have a couple of pints here before heading off to Devon for the evening. 

Gerald and I are off to Ottery St Mary to be exact, to witness one of the oldest traditions in the United Kingdom. Every November 5th is Tar Barrels. http://www.otterytarbarrels.co.uk/ and we need cheering up because we’ve had a bad week. On our last fishing trip when we was leaving the harbour an albatross circled round the DSCallards, probably after the bait.

On our last fishing trip when we was leaving the harbour an albatross circled round the DSCallards, probably after the bait. 

Anyway, it wouldn’t go away and it stayed with us for the entire trip. Now any of you who knows anything about the albatross will know that it brings bad luck, and sure enough when we cast the nets, the sea went still as a millpond and the fog rolled in. Not any old fog, but the sort of fog where you put your hand in front of your face and you can’t see it.

When we brought the nets back in there was no fish in it. Not one. Gerald tried to get rid of the albatross by banging his broom on the deck, but it was no use. This went on for days.

It reminded me of a time in the past when we was caught in a bad fog, but I couldn’t remember when. I asked Gerald to stop banging on the deck with his broom and get me the iPad.

We use Yellowfin Business Intelligence software to make sense of our fishing data. Yellowfin helps us track what we catch on every trip. Find out more at http://www.yellowfinbi.com.

I logged in to Yellowfin and went straight for a chart I knew would help us. It was a line chart with a date slider. And I’ll show you how we set it up.

From the Settings Menu on the chart we enabled the date slider in the Chart Interaction area.

 

 

Our chart was based on fishing locations over a couple of years of data. I filtered the report to show only two locations.

 



 

As you can see, there was a couple of spikes of data, so I narrowed the data down using the slider.

 

I decided to add some annotation to the chart so that in the future, if me and Gerald ever had another bad fishing trip, we could look at the historical data and find out which locations we went to in order to catch the most fish. In the Report Display area we turned on the annotation. 

Remember: annotation can only be used when the report is active.

 

Then we edited it.

  

  

 

 

The annotation is shown on the chart as a flag. If you hover over the flag, you get the message displayed.

 

Here’s the chart again showing a bit more detail. Notice the flag under the 24^th of September.

  

Much more information about this can be found on the Yellowfin Wiki at http://wiki.yellowfin.com.au/display/USER61/Report+Annotations

After a few days the albatross finally went and it was time to return home. We were both downhearted after the trip because we didn’t catch anything. However, Gerald saved the day by suggesting we made some mulled cider. Once again, the trusty iPad was brought out and we found this excellent recipe on the BBC web site.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mulledcider_8851

Hope you have a safe bonfire night (if you’re in the UK).  I’ll be sharing some more of my Yellowfin experiences soon.

Skipper Jack



For more information visit:  www.dscallards.com.