Monday, April 29, 2013

The tournament season is underway

This past Sunday marked the kickoff of the tournament season for myself and Torry Rhoades.  It's been nearly six months since the last tournament of 2012 and it couldn't have come soon enough.  Tournament waters were pools 7, 8, and 9 of the Mississippi River and we launched out of Clinton Street on pool 8.

Fishing had been tough as of late and Saturday would be our only day of practice.  We took the divide and conquer approach with Torry checking pool 7 and myself spending the day on pool 8.  Bites were hard to come by.  Typically this time of year the water temps are in the high 50's everywhere with the shallows pushing into the 60's.  This year with the late spring, morning temps didn't hit 50 in a lot of areas.  Bigger fish usually are stacking up on ledges and the males are flooding the shallows.  Our practice didn't show that.  Torry picked up only a few small bites all day on pool 7 and I didn't fair much better on pool 8.  I did manage to pick up a handful of decent bites on the flats and that became our game plan for tournament day.

Tournament day brought mild overnight temps and I was hoping that those fish on the flats would still be fired up early in the day.  I don't typically like fishing flats this time of year, especially in the mornings.  Water temps usually drop more drastically there overnight and it usually slows the fishing down.  And, of course, that was the case for us.  We made a couple passes through the most productive area first thing in the morning and only managed a pike and a few shorts.  After an hour, we decided to pull out to a nearby ledge and let those flats warm back up a bit with hopes that the bite would turn on later in the day.  During practice I picked up a single keeper fish on this particular ledge but when there's one, there's always more.  Not long after making the move, we began picking up fish.  It wasn't fast and furious, by any means, but the bite was consistent and the quality of fish were better than I had caught the day prior on the flats.  We made the decision to spend the day camped on that ledge with the hopes that more fish would filter in throughout the day.

When it was all said and done, we pulled in about 15- 20 keepers and our best eight fish weighed 23.58 lbs.  Not bad considering how tough practice had been.  It was good enough to capture second place overall.  The winners had a massive bag totaling 28.68 lbs anchored by a 5.04 lb kicker.  The funny part about this story is that when we left that flat early in the morning there was just one other boat fishing there, and yes, it was the eventual winners.   They stayed all day and the bite obviously did turn on.  I have to be honest though.  I had no idea the quality of fish that were there.  My best five fish the day prior wouldn't have broke 12 lbs, so knowing that, I still would have made all the same decisions that I did.

The rust is off.  The season is underway and the prespawn action is just heating up.  If you're getting the itch to fish, now's the time to make a trip to the river.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

First day on the water

Yesterday marked my first day fishing on open water for the 2013 fishing season.  If you're from the south you may find this ridiculous, but this year has been the coldest spring that I can remember and the ice has just recently left the river.  Ice reports from the northern part of the state are still showing numbers in excess of 20 inches.  Yikes.  (This year's statewide opener may not happen as planned.) 

I launched from Clinton Street on Pool 8 of the Mississippi River.  My goals for the day were to make sure that my motor had made it through the winter unscathed and to try and find some walleye for dinner.  With water temps around 36 degrees, I felt walleye were probably my best bet at success for the day.  Not so much.  I spent the first 3 hours of the day fighting 20mph winds only to land a few small walleyes.  I didn't catch any saugers which was surprising to me.

 I then decided to venture into some popular spring largemouth areas to throw a few baits around.  I have to be honest.  I didn't expect to get a bite.  I've never caught largemouths in water that cold, except through the ice.  My plan was to slowly drag a beaver around and hope that one would pick it up.  It didn't take long until a got what sure felt like a bite.  I set the hook only to come up with some grass on my rig.  Even though, I'd convinced myself that I'd been tricked by the grass, I threw back into the same spot.  As I S-L-O-W-L-Y dragged my lure back to the boat, I felt the telltale thunk on the end of my line.  This was definitely a fish.  I set the hook and brought a beautifully colored 3.5 pound largemouth to the boat.  Success!!!  Normally I wouldn't have gotten excited over a single fish, but this was the first largemouth of the year and I did it in ice water. (Actually saw some gulls perched on ice flows.)  I threw back to that same spot multiple times and was able to land two more nice fish.  The rest of the area didn't produce any bites.  Oh well, it was still a good day.  A day that I needed after such a long winter.

Lesson Learned:

No water is too cold to catch a bass.  They will bite.  Suck it up and figure it out.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Where we went wrong

If you read my previous post on why fish bite our lures, you might be asking yourself how it's possible that we could be wrong for so long on this basic principle of fishing.  I believe there are two main reasons for our false reasoning.  The first is the idea of anthropomorphism.  (Big word but has simple meaning)  The second is our inborn need to know why something happens.  These two combined create the perfect environment to breed misinformation.

Let's start with the term anthropomorphism.  The definition of this term is the attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being.  In other words, we try to explain and justify what a fish does based on how we act or make decisions.  This is a big problem that we need to overcome if we're going to have any chance of understanding fish behavior.  A fish's brain is much different than ours.  We make our decisions based on the process of reasoning.  Fish don't do that.  They are purely reactionary creatures.  They don't think.  When a fish sees a potential food item it triggers an instinctive feeding response.  Some days these triggers are different than others and each fish may have a different set of triggers that set them off.  These triggers can be influenced by the weather, the time of year and the need to protect, amongst others,  that I don't believe we truly understand yet.  These reactionary responses aren't limited to the fish's feeding behavior.  They play a big part in how a fish responds to danger and how they respond to changes in their environment.  If we can understand how a fish's brain works,  it well help us to stay out of the anthropomorphism trap.

The second major player that has led us down the wrong path is our unending need to know why something happens.  This is a trait that is unique to humans and plays a huge role in the process of reasoning.  This trait is something that we are born with.  It's not a learned trait.  If you have young children you know this to be the case.  Not long after our kids learn to talk they're favorite word becomes "Why?"  "Why dad?"  If you have children you know what I mean.  They often times ask why when you've already explained why.  It's how our brains work.  How does this play with fishing?  Before the age of the internet, our information gathering mechanisms were limited.  Everything we learned came from either personal experience or from limited traditional media.  Our questions were answered by a select few experts in the field and being experts they had the answers.  When asked why fish bite our lures it was natural for them to assume and then pass on to us the idea that it must be because they're fooled into thinking it's something that they already eat.  No one would question these guys at the time because they were looked upon as gods of fishing.  And they were gods.  We all have certain figures embedded into our memories from our youth that were larger than life to us.  How could you question someone with vastly more experience and knowledge than you, even if it didn't make perfect sense?  You couldn't and it became "fact". 

We came to a fork in the road some 100 years ago, or so, and we went down the wrong path.  From then on, we've been trying to find our way out of this maze not knowing that we made a wrong turn.  The key now is to backtrack to that fork in the road and take the correct course.  When we do that I believe we'll unlock new opportunities that we don't even know exist.  It will allow us to open a new way of thinking and with the information gathering capabilities we have now, maybe we can master the sport of fishing.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Are we really fooling the fish into biting?

In the world of fishing there are "rules".  Things that we are taught that basically build the foundation for our advanced understanding of the sport.  These are things that we don't really even think about because, well, EVERYONE knows them and every piece of media out there reaffirms them.  One of these "rules" is that our lures must be made to imitate natural forage.  A crankbait looks like a shad.  A jig looks like a crawfish.  A frog looks like....well... a frog of course.  This all makes perfect sense right?  If you're going to try to catch a fish what better way than to mimic it's natural food sources.  The problem with this theory is that we in no way actually achieve this goal.  Not by look, sound, vibration, taste or by any other means.  All those that have taught us this are wrong.  That's right.  Everyone's wrong.  The world is not flat.

Ok.  So it's one thing to say that everyone's wrong but what evidence do I have to back this up?  The same evidence that you all have.  Let's start with the most obvious the crankbait.  The idea behind the crankbait is that it mimics an injured baitfish.  Yet the bait doesn't really swim like a live baitfish.  With a little imagination maybe you could say that it does.  Our crankbaits are packed with rattles and create a huge disturbance under the water, yet a live baitfish doesn't sound or feel like that to a bass. Common sense tells you that.  Some of the best selling crankbait colors on the market don't look anything like the real thing and even the most expensive custom painted crankbaits, while they make us feel good, don't really produce any better than the standard colors.  And last but not least, let's not forget that to get a bass to eat a crankbait we need to crash it into something or it just won't work.  Hmmm......

Not convinced yet?  Let's move on to the spinnerbait.  This one really takes some imagination to see the resemblance to a live shad and yet that's what we believe.  All the same things apply to the spinnerbait as far as sight, sound and vibration go.  No where near duplicating the real thing.  But wait the blades give off flash that resembles that of a shad and that's why they eat it.....yet they rarely try to eat the blades and yet eat the skirted portion. ( It would be an awfully frustrating bait to throw if they continually tried to eat the blades.)  Add onto that the advice of all the best spinnerbait fishermen on the planet...."Always use a trailer hook".  Why do we need to do that if the fish are convinced that the bait is a shad?  Hmmm.......

Still not convinced????  How about the jig?  Well that, of course, looks like a crawdad.  Duh....  Unless your fishing it around bluegills....then it looks like a bluegill.  Or if you're swimming it then it looks like a shad.  Interesting.  Just by looks it doesn't really look like a crawfish.  I mean really, if I held up a jig for 1 second in front of 1000 bass anglers not a single one would be confused into thinking it was a crawfish.  Right?  We drag it on the bottom which is where the crawfish live, but that shouldn't automatically mean that the bass believe it's a crawfish.  Yet that's what we assume.  You know what they say about ASS U ME.

I could go on and on with virtually every lure known to man.  A red crankbait is considered crawfish pattern even though I've never seen a red crawfish besides on the dinner table in the bayou.  Smallmouth love pink flukes because.....I have no idea.  A senko looks like a dying shad fluttering to the bottom....Sure..  A spook, a jerkbait, a crankbait, a spinnerbait, a swimbait, a fluke, a spoon, and a buzzbait are all supposed to imitate  the same natural forage yet none of them look, sound or feel alike whatsoever.   There is a definite err in our judgement.

If we're not fooling the bass into believing our baits are natural forage then why do they eat our lures?  The answer is simple.  Our lures appeal to the fish's senses for what they are....a potential food source.  Do you think that smallmouth on the Great Lakes had to figure out what a goby "looked like" before they decided to eat one?  They don't know what a crankbait is but it's making noise and swimming through their environment banging into stuff so they react to it the only way they know how by eating it.  A worm has a seductive tail action that looks alive so they eat it.  A frog dancing above their heads means an ambush is likely to be successful so they attack..sometimes.  Even though our intuition tells us that our baits don't look like the real thing,  we still need to try and figure out what it looks like or we simply won't use them.  Tune ahead to the 1:04 mark of this video with Mark Zona for a perfect example.


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz4q-isT6S8&feature=youtu.be



You may be asking yourself if they are reacting to our lures as a potential food source, then how can I be so sure that they don't think they're native forage? That video for one but also this became clear to me on an outing last fall on the Pool 8 of the Mississippi River.  The backwaters were full of shad and bass gorging themselves.  Fish were busting bait continuously in about 6 feet of water.  I threw literally every "shad imitating" bait that I had and was only able to coax a few fish into biting.  Traditional wisdom would lead you to believe that by mimicking natural forage I should have been able to clean house, but that wasn't the case.  Later that day a buddy of mine was in the same area and he too went through the same ritual of switching "shad type" baits trying to get bit with the same results.  However, the guy that he had fishing with him tied on a dropshot with a pink roboworm and started wrecking them.  Even though the fish were clearly feeding on shad not a single shad style bait tripped their trigger, yet a 6" pink wacky-rigged roboworm smashed them. That's not a unique experience.  It happens all the time, all over the country, but we have this idea that we need to match the hatch to get bit.  That cemented the skepticism I had about our lures actually tricking the fish.  I believe that certain baits on certain days simply appeal to the fish's senses more than others.  Not because they're more realistic but because of some reason that we simply cannot understand.  This explanation might not be appealing to our psyche but I believe it to be the case.

I understand if you think I'm crazy for going against the grain on what's believed to be one of the simplest rules of fishing.  I'm sure you're not alone.  It'd likely take someone far more influential to make these assertions before it would become the mainstream way of thinking.  In my future blog posts I'll talk about how I believe these misconceptions came about, as well as, what it means for the way we fish and potential lure making opportunities in the future.



Think I'm crazy?  I want to know what you think.   Feel free to comment in the section below.