I am very pleased to announce that Patent 11473893 has been granted by the US Patent Office as of October 18, 2022. This patent covers the method and the means used by the Trolling Angles app, and is described on the web site trollingangles.com.
This method is: Measuring line lengths and line angles at the surface, assuming those angles remain unchanged as the fishing line is deployed deeper, and computing depth curve data consisting of a sequence of one or more curves derived from the measured line lengths and angles. This method is protected regardless of the technology used to measure lengths and angles or to compute the curve.
Using a computing device and software to implement the method is also explicitly protected by the patent.
The patent also protects the Trolling Angles Autocline, a wireless fishing line angle measuring device.
Patents are granted for devices and methods that are “useful, novel, and non-obvious”.
The method described by the patent is useful. It allows anyone to generate their own accurate dive curves, with far less effort than any other known method.
The method is novel, i.e. new. A patent search, google search, and a review of literature, by the applicant and by the patent examiner did not uncover any previous published explanation of this method. If this method were common previous knowledge, other depth curve providers would have probably used it, and it would have been described in fishing magazines and books.
The method is non-obvious. At least it was not obvious to me, a person with a science, mathematics and computing education and a lifetime of fishing experience. I tried several other inadequate and more complicated ideas to determine trolling depth before realizing this method.
Duane Silkworth
